Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (PBH)

A whopping number of 13F filings filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been processed by Insider Monkey so that individual investors can look at the overall hedge fund sentiment towards the stocks included in their watchlists. These freshly-submitted public filings disclose money managers’ equity positions as of the end of the three-month period that ended September 30, so let’s proceed with the discussion of the hedge fund sentiment on Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH) .

Is Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH) a healthy stock for your portfolio? The best stock pickers are reducing their bets on the stock. The number of long hedge fund bets were trimmed by 1 lately. There were 18 hedge funds in our database with PBH positions 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 Metals USA Holdings Corp (NYSE:MUSA), Owens-Illinois Inc (NYSE:OI), and Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR) to gather more data points.

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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With all of this in mind, we’re going to take a look at the new action surrounding Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH).

Hedge fund activity in Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH)

At Q3’s end, a total of 17 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, down 6% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 15 hedge funds with a bullish position in PBH at the beginning of this year. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Manor Road Capital Partners, led by John Ku, holds the biggest position in Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH). According to regulatory filings, the fund has a $73.6 million position in the stock, comprising 10.2% of its 13F portfolio. On Manor Road Capital Partners’s heels is Fisher Asset Management, led by Ken Fisher, holding a $73.3 million position; 0.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism encompass Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital 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.

Since Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH) has experienced declining sentiment from the smart money, logic holds that there exists a select few hedge funds that decided to sell off their positions entirely in the third quarter. Intriguingly, Glenn Russell Dubin’s Highbridge Capital Management said goodbye to the biggest investment of all the investors watched by Insider Monkey, valued at an estimated $1.6 million in stock, and George Hall’s Clinton Group was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $1.4 million worth of shares.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH). We will take a look at Metals USA Holdings Corp (NYSE:MUSA), Owens-Illinois Inc (NYSE:OI), Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR), and Intrexon Corp (NYSE:XON). This group of stocks’ market caps are similar to PBH’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 17 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $432 million. That figure was $205 million in PBH’s case. Owens-Illinois Inc (NYSE:OI) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Intrexon Corp (NYSE:XON) is the least popular one with only 10 bullish hedge fund positions. Prestige Brands Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PBH) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard OI might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: none.