Here is What Hedge Funds Think About John Bean Technologies Corporation (JBT)

Hedge funds and large money managers usually invest with a focus on the long-term horizon and, therefore, short-lived dips or bumps on the charts usually don’t make them change their opinion towards a company. This time it may be different. The coronavirus pandemic destroyed the high correlations among major industries and asset classes. We are now in a stock pickers market where fundamentals of a stock have more effect on the price than the overall direction of the market. As a result we observe sudden and large changes in hedge fund positions depending on the news flow. Let’s take a look at the hedge fund sentiment towards John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT) to find out whether there were any major changes in hedge funds’ views.

Is John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT) undervalued? Prominent investors were getting less optimistic. The number of long hedge fund bets went down by 2 recently. John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT) was in 19 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of June. The all time high for this statistic is 21. Our calculations also showed that JBT isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Hedge funds have more than $3.5 trillion in assets under management, so you can’t expect their entire portfolios to beat the market by large margins. Our research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 79 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). So you can still find a lot of gems by following hedge funds’ moves today.

Richard Driehaus of Driehaus Capital

With all of this in mind we’re going to review the new hedge fund action encompassing John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT).

Do Hedge Funds Think JBT Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At second quarter’s end, a total of 19 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -10% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards JBT over the last 24 quarters. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of notable hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

Among these funds, Royce & Associates held the most valuable stake in John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT), which was worth $92.7 million at the end of the second quarter. On the second spot was D E Shaw which amassed $11.7 million worth of shares. Driehaus Capital, ACK Asset Management, and Citadel Investment Group were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position ACK Asset Management allocated the biggest weight to John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT), around 3.21% of its 13F portfolio. Royce & Associates is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 0.64 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to JBT.

Since John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT) has experienced bearish sentiment from hedge fund managers, we can see that there was a specific group of funds that slashed their full holdings heading into Q3. Intriguingly, Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint Capital dumped the largest position of all the hedgies monitored by Insider Monkey, comprising about $2.1 million in stock.  Renaissance Technologies, also cut its stock, about $1.1 million worth. These transactions are important to note, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds heading into Q3.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT). We will take a look at Galapagos NV (NASDAQ:GLPG), Itron, Inc. (NASDAQ:ITRI), fuboTV Inc. (NYSE:FUBO), Xerox Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ:XRX), Shake Shack Inc (NYSE:SHAK), UMB Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:UMBF), and Seaboard Corporation (NYSE:SEB). This group of stocks’ market valuations are closest to JBT’s market valuation.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 18.4 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $368 million. That figure was $162 million in JBT’s case. Xerox Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ:XRX) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Seaboard Corporation (NYSE:SEB) is the least popular one with only 13 bullish hedge fund positions. John Bean Technologies Corporation (NYSE:JBT) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for JBT is 55.1. 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% in 2021 through October 22nd and still beat the market by 1.6 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on JBT as the stock returned 5% since the end of Q2 (through 10/22) and outperformed the market. Hedge funds were rewarded for their relative bullishness.

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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.