Here is What Hedge Funds and Insiders Think About Brink’s Co (BCO)

Is Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO) a good investment?

To many market players, hedge funds are perceived as useless, outdated financial vehicles of a period lost to current times. Although there are In excess of 8,000 hedge funds with their doors open in present day, this site looks at the moguls of this club, about 525 funds. It is assumed that this group controls most of all hedge funds’ total assets, and by keeping an eye on their best equity investments, we’ve come up with a few investment strategies that have historically outperformed the S&P 500. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outstripped the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per year for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have outpaced the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (find the details here).

Equally as useful, optimistic insider trading sentiment is another way to analyze the stock market universe. Just as you’d expect, there are many incentives for a corporate insider to sell shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would initiate a purchase. Plenty of empirical studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this method if investors know where to look (learn more here).

Now that that’s out of the way, it’s important to analyze the recent info about Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO).

Hedge fund activity in Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO)

Heading into Q3, a total of 17 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of 0% from the previous quarter. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes substantially.

When using filings from the hedgies we track, GAMCO Investors, managed by Mario Gabelli, holds the largest position in Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO). GAMCO Investors has a $70.2 million position in the stock, comprising 0.4% of its 13F portfolio. On GAMCO Investors’s heels is William von Mueffling of Cantillon Capital Management, with a $67 million position; 2% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Remaining hedgies that are bullish include Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates, David Dreman’s Dreman Value Management and John W. Rogers’s Ariel Investments.

As Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO) has experienced bearish sentiment from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, we can see that there is a sect of money managers that slashed their entire stakes heading into Q2. Interestingly, Matthew Hulsizer’s PEAK6 Capital Management sold off the biggest position of all the hedgies we track, valued at about $0.5 million in stock, and Glenn Russell Dubin of Highbridge Capital Management was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $0.3 million worth. These moves are important to note, as total hedge fund interest stayed the same (this is a bearish signal in our experience).

How are insiders trading Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO)?

Bullish insider trading is best served when the company in question has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the latest six-month time frame, Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO) has seen zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

We’ll also review the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Brink’s Co (NYSE:BCO). These stocks are Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc (NASDAQ:KTOS), American Science & Engineering, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASEI), Checkpoint Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CKP), The Geo Group, Inc. (NYSE:GEO), and Ascent Capital Group Inc (NASDAQ:ASCMA). This group of stocks are the members of the security & protection services industry and their market caps resemble BCO’s market cap.