The worries about the election and the ongoing uncertainty about the path of interest-rate increases have been keeping investors on the sidelines. Of course, most hedge funds and other asset managers have been underperforming main stock market indices since the middle of 2015. Interestingly though, smaller-cap stocks registered their best performance relative to the large-capitalization stocks since the end of the June quarter, suggesting that this may be the best time to take a cue from their stock picks. In fact, the Russell 2000 Index gained more than 15% since the beginning of the third quarter, while the Standard and Poor’s 500 benchmark returned less than 6%. This article will lay out and discuss the hedge fund and institutional investor sentiment towards Pitney Bowes Inc. (NYSE:PBI).
Is Pitney Bowes Inc. (NYSE:PBI) an attractive investment right now? Money managers are taking a bullish view. The number of bullish hedge fund bets rose by 2 in recent months. PBI was in 21 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 19 hedge funds in our database with PBI holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare PBI to other stocks including Sunoco LP (NYSE:SUN), Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc (NYSE:DO), and Outfront Media Inc (NYSE:OUT) to get a better sense of its popularity.
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At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.
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How are hedge funds trading Pitney Bowes Inc. (NYSE:PBI)?
At Q3’s end, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, an 11% rise from the previous quarter, and third straight quarter with a rise as ownership of the stock among hedge funds pushes to a yearly high. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).
Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, David Cohen and Harold Levy’s Iridian Asset Management has the number one position in Pitney Bowes Inc. (NYSE:PBI), worth close to $219.3 million, accounting for 1.9% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is D E Shaw, founded by David E. Shaw, holding a $58.9 million position. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism include Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management, Joel Greenblatt’s Gotham Asset Management and Anthony Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital.
