After several tireless days we have finished crunching the numbers from nearly 900 13F filings issued by the elite hedge funds and other investment firms that we track at Insider Monkey, which disclosed those firms’ equity portfolios as of June 30th. The results of that effort will be put on display in this article, as we share valuable insight into the smart money sentiment towards Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF).
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) investors should pay attention to an increase in hedge fund interest in recent months. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) was in 32 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 34. Our calculations also showed that ANF isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).
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Richard Driehaus of Driehaus Capital
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Do Hedge Funds Think ANF Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
At Q2’s end, a total of 32 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 60% from the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in ANF over the last 24 quarters. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).
The largest stake in Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) was held by Paradice Investment Management, which reported holding $124.9 million worth of stock at the end of June. It was followed by Arrowstreet Capital with a $97.8 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Scopus Asset Management, Melvin Capital Management, and Citadel Investment Group. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Divisar Capital allocated the biggest weight to Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF), around 6.22% of its 13F portfolio. Paradice Investment Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 5.8 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to ANF.
As industrywide interest jumped, some big names have been driving this bullishness. Scopus Asset Management, managed by Alexander Mitchell, established the biggest position in Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF). Scopus Asset Management had $52.2 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Gabriel Plotkin’s Melvin Capital Management also made a $50.8 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new ANF positions are Richard Driehaus’s Driehaus Capital, Doug Gordon, Jon Hilsabeck and Don Jabro’s Shellback Capital, and Anthony Joseph Vaccarino’s North Fourth Asset Management.
Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF). We will take a look at Mr. Cooper Group Inc. (NASDAQ:COOP), Laureate Education, Inc. (NASDAQ:LAUR), Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS), FormFactor, Inc. (NASDAQ:FORM), GrowGeneration Corp. (NASDAQ:GRWG), Arcosa, Inc. (NYSE:ACA), and Brinker International, Inc. (NYSE:EAT). This group of stocks’ market valuations match ANF’s market valuation.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| COOP | 28 | 660134 | 4 |
| LAUR | 20 | 203841 | -1 |
| NUS | 20 | 298814 | 1 |
| FORM | 20 | 167474 | 3 |
| GRWG | 17 | 128612 | -1 |
| ACA | 12 | 155930 | -5 |
| EAT | 31 | 353266 | 0 |
| Average | 21.1 | 281153 | 0.1 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 21.1 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $281 million. That figure was $565 million in ANF’s case. Brinker International, Inc. (NYSE:EAT) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Arcosa, Inc. (NYSE:ACA) is the least popular one with only 12 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) is more popular among hedge funds. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for ANF is 88.2. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. Our calculations showed that top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 24.9% in 2021 through October 15th and still beat the market by 4.5 percentage points. Unfortunately ANF wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on ANF were disappointed as the stock returned -15.7% since the end of the second quarter (through 10/15) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.
Follow Abercrombie & Fitch Co (NYSE:ANF)
Follow Abercrombie & Fitch Co (NYSE:ANF)
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
