Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (LTRPA)

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. Insider Monkey finished processing 821 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of March 31st, 2020. In this article we are going to take a look at smart money sentiment towards Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA).

Is Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA) a healthy stock for your portfolio? Money managers are reducing their bets on the stock. The number of long hedge fund positions dropped by 2 lately. Our calculations also showed that LTRPA isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks).

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

In the financial world there are a large number of tools investors have at their disposal to grade stocks. A pair of the most under-the-radar tools are hedge fund and insider trading indicators. We have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the best fund managers can outperform the broader indices by a solid amount. Insider Monkey’s monthly stock picks returned 101% since March 2017 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 58 percentage points. Our short strategy outperformed the S&P 500 short ETFs by 20 percentage points annually (see the details here). That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is a useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.

Jeffrey Bronchick of Cove Street Capital

At Insider Monkey we leave no stone unturned when looking for the next great investment idea. For example, 2020’s unprecedented market conditions provide us with the highest number of trading opportunities in a decade. So we are checking out trades like this one. We interview hedge fund managers and ask them about their best ideas. If you want to find out the best healthcare stock to buy right now, you can watch our latest hedge fund manager interview here. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. Our best call in 2020 was shorting the market when the S&P 500 was trading at 3150 after realizing the coronavirus pandemic’s significance before most investors. Keeping this in mind we’re going to review the key hedge fund action surrounding Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA).

How are hedge funds trading Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA)?

At Q1’s end, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -9% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards LTRPA over the last 18 quarters. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Boykin Curry’s Eagle Capital Management has the largest position in Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA), worth close to $9.3 million, corresponding to less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is D E Shaw, managed by D. E. Shaw, which holds a $5.5 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other peers with similar optimism encompass Jeffrey Bronchick’s Cove Street Capital, Renaissance Technologies and Sander Gerber’s Hudson Bay Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Cove Street Capital allocated the biggest weight to Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA), around 0.88% of its 13F portfolio. Isomer Partners is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 0.64 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to LTRPA.

Since Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA) has faced bearish sentiment from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, we can see that there were a few funds who sold off their positions entirely by the end of the first quarter. Interestingly, David Costen Haley’s HBK Investments said goodbye to the biggest stake of the “upper crust” of funds watched by Insider Monkey, worth about $16 million in stock. Mark Cohen’s fund, Stone House Capital, also cut its stock, about $5.5 million worth. These transactions are important to note, as total hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds by the end of the first quarter.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA) but similarly valued. These stocks are Tyme Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:TYME), Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc (NYSE:LL), Americas Gold and Silver Corporation (NYSE:USAS), and Protara Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:TARA). This group of stocks’ market caps are closest to LTRPA’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 8.25 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $25 million. That figure was $38 million in LTRPA’s case. Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc (NYSE:LL) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Tyme Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:TYME) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Liberty Tripadvisor Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LTRPA) is more popular among hedge funds. Our calculations showed that top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.4% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10.1 percentage points. These stocks returned 12.2% in 2020 through June 17th but still managed to beat the market by 14.8 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on LTRPA as the stock returned 25.6% so far in Q2 (through June 17th) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin. Hedge funds were clearly right about piling into this stock relative to other stocks with similar market capitalizations.

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