Here Is What Hedge Funds Think About CIGNA Corporation (CI)

Before we spend many hours researching a company, we’d like to analyze what hedge funds and billionaire investors think of the stock first. We would like to do so because the elite investors’ consensus returns have been exceptional. The top 30 mid-cap stocks among the best performing hedge funds in our database yielded an average return of 18% during the last 12 months, outperforming the S&P 500 Index funds by double digits. Although the elite funds occasionally have their duds, such as SunEdison and Valeant, the hedge fund picks seem to work on average. In the following paragraphs, we find out what the billionaire investors and hedge funds think of CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI).

Is CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI) a healthy stock for your portfolio? Money managers are becoming less hopeful, as the number of long hedge fund bets fell by four in recent months. At the end of this article we will also compare CI to other stocks including Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (USA) (NYSE:BAM), Monster Beverage Corp (NASDAQ:MNST), and Capital One Financial Corp. (NYSE:COF) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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.

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Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at the new action encompassing CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI).

How have hedgies been trading CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI)?

At the end of September, 55 funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in CIGNA Corporation, down by 7% over the quarter. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Larry Robbins’ Glenview Capital has the largest position in CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI), worth close to $780.8 million, corresponding to 5.6% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is PAR Capital Management, led by Paul Reeder and Edward Shapiro, which holds a $393.3 million position; the fund has 5.7% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other peers that are bullish consist of David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, Andrew Feldstein and Stephen Siderow’s Blue Mountain Capital and Arthur B Cohen and Joseph Healey’s Healthcor Management LP.

Seeing as CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI) has witnessed falling interest from the aggregate hedge fund industry, logic holds that there is a sect of funds who were dropping their entire stakes in the third quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Jeffrey Tannenbaum’s Fir Tree dropped the largest stake of the “upper crust” of funds tracked by Insider Monkey, comprising an estimated $142.1 million in stock, and Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global was right behind this move, as the fund sold off about $64.2 million worth of shares.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI). These stocks are Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (USA) (NYSE:BAM), Monster Beverage Corp (NASDAQ:MNST), Capital One Financial Corp. (NYSE:COF), and Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK). This group of stocks’ market valuations match CI’s market valuation.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 29 investors holding long positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1.21 billion. That figure was $3.15 billion in CIGNA’s case. Capital One Financial Corp. (NYSE:COF) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:NOK) is the least popular one with only 16 investors reporting ownership of its stock. Compared to these stocks CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI) is more popular among hedge funds. Considering that hedge funds are fond of this stock in relation to its market cap peers, it may be a good idea to analyze it in detail and potentially include it in your portfolio.