Hedge Funds Weigh In On TCF Financial Corporation (TCB)

There are several ways to beat the market, and investing in small cap stocks has historically been one of them. We like to improve the odds of beating the market further by examining what famous hedge fund operators such as Carl Icahn and George Soros think. Those hedge fund operators make billions of dollars each year by hiring the best and the brightest to do research on stocks, including small cap stocks that big brokerage houses simply don’t cover. Because of Carl Icahn and other successful funds’ exemplary historical records, we pay attention to their small cap picks. In this article, we use hedge fund filing data to analyze TCF Financial Corporation (NYSE:TCB).

TCF Financial Corporation (NYSE:TCB) has experienced a decrease in support from the world’s most successful money managers recently. TCB was in 16 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 18 hedge funds in our database with TCB holdings at the end of the previous quarter. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Ormat Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:ORA), Kennedy-Wilson Holdings Inc (NYSE:KW), and Cal-Maine Foods Inc (NASDAQ:CALM) to gather more data points.

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.

3d Pictures/Shutterstock.com

What have hedge funds been doing with TCF Financial Corporation (NYSE:TCB)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 16 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a dip of 11% from one quarter earlier. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in TCB over the last 5 quarters, which has trended down throughout that time. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, founded by Jim Simons, holds the biggest position in TCF Financial Corporation (NYSE:TCB). Renaissance Technologies has a $26.6 million position in the stock. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Pzena Investment Management, led by Richard S. Pzena, holding a $22.9 million position. Remaining peers that hold long positions comprise Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, and David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.