Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Principal Financial Group Inc (PFG)

Is Principal Financial Group Inc (NYSE:PFG) a good place to invest some of your money right now? We can gain invaluable insight to help us answer that question by studying the investment trends of top investors, who employ world-class Ivy League graduates, who are given immense resources and industry contacts to put their financial expertise to work. The top picks of these firms have historically outperformed the market when we account for known risk factors, making them very valuable investment ideas.

In Principal Financial Group Inc (NYSE:PFG)’s case, it looks like hedge funds are taking a bearish view. The number of bullish hedge fund positions (among the funds in our database) declined by three between July and September. In this way, 15 investors held shares of PFG at the end of the third quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare PFG to other stocks including Advance Auto Parts, Inc. (NYSE:AAP), Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), and Pembina Pipeline Corp (NYSE:PBA) 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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Now, we’re going to check out the fresh action encompassing Principal Financial Group Inc (NYSE:PFG).

How are hedge funds trading Principal Financial Group Inc (NYSE:PFG)?

At the end of September, 15 funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on PFG, down by 17% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards PFG over the last five quarters. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital has the most valuable position in Principal Financial Group Inc (NYSE:PFG), worth close to $58.3 million, corresponding to 0.2% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management, with a $19.8 million position; 0.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions consist of Anand Parekh’s Alyeska Investment Group, John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, and David Harding’s Winton 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.