Hedge Funds Have Never Been This Bullish On Chase Corporation (CCF)

Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and successful value investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds’ and successful investors’ positions as of the end of the first quarter. You can find articles about an individual hedge fund’s trades on numerous financial news websites. However, in this article we will take a look at their collective moves over the last 4.5 years and analyze what the smart money thinks of Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF) based on that data and determine whether they were really smart about the stock.

Is Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF) undervalued? Prominent investors were in a bullish mood. The number of long hedge fund bets rose by 1 lately. Our calculations also showed that CCF isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks).

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

To most market participants, hedge funds are assumed to be underperforming, old financial vehicles of years past. While there are greater than 8000 funds in operation at the moment, Our researchers look at the bigwigs of this group, about 850 funds. These hedge fund managers manage the lion’s share of the smart money’s total capital, and by paying attention to their best investments, Insider Monkey has found a few investment strategies that have historically beaten Mr. Market. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy outrun the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points per annum since its inception in March 2017. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 36% since February 2017 (through May 18th) even though the market was up 30% during the same period. We just shared a list of 8 short targets in our latest quarterly update .

David Harding of Winton Capital Management

At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. There is a lot of volatility in the markets and this presents amazing investment opportunities from time to time. For example, this trader claims to deliver juiced up returns with one trade a week, so we are checking out his highest conviction idea. A second trader claims to score lucrative profits by utilizing a “weekend trading strategy”, so we look into his strategy’s picks. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. We recently recommended several stocks partly inspired by legendary Bill Miller’s investor letter. Our best call in 2020 was shorting the market when the S&P 500 was trading at 3150 in February after realizing the coronavirus pandemic’s significance before most investors. With all of this in mind let’s analyze the new hedge fund action regarding Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF).

How are hedge funds trading Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF)?

At the end of the first quarter, a total of 10 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 11% from the fourth quarter of 2019. On the other hand, there were a total of 9 hedge funds with a bullish position in CCF a year ago. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies,  holds the largest position in Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF). Renaissance Technologies has a $33.4 million position in the stock, comprising less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Royce & Associates, managed by Chuck Royce, which holds a $14.3 million position; the fund has 0.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism consist of David P. Cohen’s Minerva Advisors, Touk Sinantha’s AltraVue Capital and David Harding’s Winton Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Minerva Advisors allocated the biggest weight to Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF), around 10.5% of its 13F portfolio. AltraVue Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 2.36 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to CCF.

As one would reasonably expect, some big names have jumped into Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF) headfirst. Springbok Capital, managed by Gavin Saitowitz and Cisco J. del Valle, created the most outsized position in Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF). Springbok Capital had $0 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF). These stocks are HealthStream, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSTM), K12 Inc. (NYSE:LRN), Unisys Corporation (NYSE:UIS), and Yunji Inc. (NASDAQ:YJ). This group of stocks’ market caps match CCF’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 14.25 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $58 million. That figure was $68 million in CCF’s case. K12 Inc. (NYSE:LRN) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Yunji Inc. (NASDAQ:YJ) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Chase Corporation (NYSE:CCF) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our calculations showed that top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.4% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10.1 percentage points. These stocks gained 12.3% in 2020 through June 30th but beat the market by 15.5 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on CCF, though not to the same extent, as the stock returned 24.6% during the second quarter and outperformed the market.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.