Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Carmike Cinemas, Inc. (CKEC)

Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.

Is Carmike Cinemas, Inc. (NASDAQ:CKEC) a healthy stock for your portfolio? The best stock pickers are undoubtedly getting less bullish. The number of bullish hedge fund positions were cut by 5 recently. CKEC was in 18 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 23 hedge funds in our database with CKEC 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 Veeco Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ:VECO), Harsco Corporation (NYSE:HSC), and Federal Signal Corporation (NYSE:FSS) to gather more data points.

We care about hedge fund sentiment because historically hedge funds’ stock picks delivered strong risk adjusted returns. There are certain segments of the market where hedge funds’ stock picks performed much better than its benchmarks. For instance, the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks among the best performing hedge funds returned 18% over the last 12 months outpacing S&P 500 Index by more than 10 percentage points. We developed this strategy 2.5 years ago and started sharing its picks in our quarterly newsletter. It bested the S&P 500 Index ETFs by delivering a solid 39% vs. 22% gain for its benchmarks.

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What have hedge funds been doing with Carmike Cinemas, Inc. (NASDAQ:CKEC)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a drop of 22% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards CKEC over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Richard Driehaus’ Driehaus Capital has the biggest position in Carmike Cinemas, Inc. (NASDAQ:CKEC), worth close to $79.5 million, comprising 2.7% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies holding a $39.5 million position. Other professional money managers that are bullish consist of Alec Litowitz and Ross Laser’s Magnetar Capital, Carl Tiedemann and Michael Tiedemann’s TIG Advisors and John Bader’s Halcyon Asset Management. 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.