Mesabi Trust (NYSE:MSB) has seen a decrease in hedge fund sentiment recently; in our experience, stagnant interest is a bearish sign.
If you’d ask most shareholders, hedge funds are perceived as slow, outdated investment tools of yesteryear. While there are more than 8000 funds trading at present, we at Insider Monkey choose to focus on the masters of this club, about 450 funds. Most estimates calculate that this group has its hands on most of the smart money’s total asset base, and by keeping an eye on their top stock picks, we have spotted a few investment strategies that have historically beaten the broader indices. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outperformed the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per annum for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have outpaced the S&P 500 index by 24 percentage points in 7 months (explore the details and some picks here).
Equally as key, bullish insider trading sentiment is a second way to parse down the financial markets. There are a variety of motivations for an insider to drop shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would initiate a purchase. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this strategy if piggybackers know where to look (learn more here).
Keeping this in mind, let’s take a gander at the recent action encompassing Mesabi Trust (NYSE:MSB).
How are hedge funds trading Mesabi Trust (NYSE:MSB)?
At year’s end, a total of 6 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of 0% from the third quarter. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes meaningfully.
According to our comprehensive database, Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies had the most valuable position in Mesabi Trust (NYSE:MSB), worth close to $3.5 million, accounting for less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Gotham Asset Management, managed by Joel Greenblatt, which held a $2.1 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other hedgies that hold long positions include John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.
How are insiders trading Mesabi Trust (NYSE:MSB)?
Insider purchases made by high-level executives is best served when the company in question has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the last half-year time frame, Mesabi Trust (NYSE:MSB) has experienced zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
Let’s also review hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to Mesabi Trust (NYSE:MSB). These stocks are Gladstone Investment Corporation (NASDAQ:GAIN), North European Oil Royalty (NYSE:NRT), KCAP Financial Inc (NASDAQ:KCAP), INTL Fcstone Inc (NASDAQ:INTL), and MVC Capital, Inc. (NYSE:MVC). This group of stocks belong to the diversified investments industry and their market caps are closest to MSB’s market cap.
