Hengistbury Unloads Boeing (BA), Holds Steady On Big Q3 Gainers Charter (CHTR), LivaNova (LIVN)

Hengistbury Investment Partners is a London-based hedge fund founded by Stuart Powers. The fund’s equity portfolio is valued at $587.86 million as of September 30, and the fund’s picks returned 11.54% in the third quarter when looking at its 6 long positions in companies having a market cap of at least $1 billion. Among the fund’s favorite stock picks were Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHTR), The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA), LivaNova PLC NASDAQ:LIVN), and Mylan Inc. (NASDAQ:MYL), which we’ll look at in this article to see how the fund traded them in Q3 and how they performed during the period.

Hedge funds had a pretty solid run for much of this year, generating positive returns for seven or eight consecutive months (depending on the source) before that streak came to an end in October. The third-quarter was a particularly strong one for the industry, as evidenced by our own data. 659 funds in our system which filed for the June 30 13F reporting period held long positions in at least 5 non-micro-cap stocks, and those funds’ long bets posted 8.3% gains in the third-quarter based on the size of their positions on June 30. That easily bested the performance of S&P 500 ETFs, which returned only 3.3% for the period.

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Hengistbury Investment Partners has 766,488 shares of Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHTR) among its holdings as of the end of the third quarter, valued at over $206.93 million. The fund sold just 764 shares of the stock during the third quarter, during which time it returned 18.1%, so the fund believes there is more room yet to run for Charter.

At the end of the second quarter, a total of 134 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a 37% jump from the previous quarter. The largest stake in Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHTR) was held by Berkshire Hathaway, which reported holding $2.13 billion worth of stock as of the end of June. It was followed by Lone Pine Capital with a $1.10 billion position. Other investors bullish on the company included Tiger Global Management LLC, Soroban Capital Partners, and Egerton Capital Limited.

During the third quarter, Hengistbury Investment Partners sold all 248,500 shares of The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA) that it held on June 30, leaving no stake in the company. The stock gained 2.3% during a very non-volatile third-quarter for its shares.

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Greenhaven Associates, managed by Edgar Wachenheim, holds the largest position in The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA) among the funds we track. Greenhaven Associates has a $171.1 million position in the stock. Coming in second is AQR Capital Management, led by Cliff Asness, holding a $161.9 million position. Other peers that hold long positions contain Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management, D E Shaw, founded by David E. Shaw, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.

We’ll check out two more of the fund’s stock picks on the next page.