The financial regulations require hedge funds and wealthy investors that exceeded the $100 million holdings threshold to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings to a certain extent level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings disclosed the funds’ positions on March 31st. We at Insider Monkey have made an extensive database of more than 866 of those established hedge funds and famous value investors’ filings. In this article, we analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT) based on those filings.
Is Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT) a bargain? Prominent investors were getting more optimistic. The number of long hedge fund bets inched up by 1 lately. Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT) was in 4 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 9. Our calculations also showed that QTT isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings). There were 3 hedge funds in our database with QTT holdings at the end of December.
If you’d ask most investors, hedge funds are seen as worthless, outdated investment tools of years past. While there are greater than 8000 funds trading at present, Our researchers hone in on the crème de la crème of this club, about 850 funds. These hedge fund managers preside over the majority of the hedge fund industry’s total asset base, and by shadowing their first-class picks, Insider Monkey has unsheathed a number of investment strategies that have historically outperformed the broader indices. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy exceeded the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points per year since its inception in March 2017. Also, our monthly newsletter’s portfolio of long stock picks returned 206.8% since March 2017 (through May 2021) and beat the S&P 500 Index by more than 115 percentage points. You can download a sample issue of this newsletter on our website .
Donald Sussman of Paloma Partners
At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, an activist hedge fund wants to buy this $28 biotech stock for $50. So, we recommended a long position to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 10 best battery stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. Keeping this in mind we’re going to take a look at the key hedge fund action regarding Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT).
Do Hedge Funds Think QTT Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
At Q1’s end, a total of 4 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 33% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 9 hedge funds with a bullish position in QTT a year ago. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Frank Fu’s CaaS Capital has the most valuable position in Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT), worth close to $2.2 million, comprising less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Donald Sussman of Paloma Partners, with a $0.3 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other peers that hold long positions encompass Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, and Israel Englander’s Millennium Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position CaaS Capital allocated the biggest weight to Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT), around 0.02% of its 13F portfolio. Paloma Partners is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 0.01 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to QTT.
As aggregate interest increased, some big names were leading the bulls’ herd. CaaS Capital, managed by Frank Fu, initiated the most outsized position in Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT). CaaS Capital had $2.2 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Donald Sussman’s Paloma Partners also initiated a $0.3 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new QTT positions are Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and Israel Englander’s Millennium Management.
Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT) but similarly valued. These stocks are Tian Ruixiang Holdings Ltd (NASDAQ:TIRX), The ExOne Company (NASDAQ:XONE), Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSII), Bright Scholar Education Holdings Limited (NYSE:BEDU), Winmark Corporation (NASDAQ:WINA), Antares Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:ATRS), and Brookfield Property REIT Inc. (NASDAQ:BPYU). This group of stocks’ market values are closest to QTT’s market value.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| TIRX | 1 | 763 | 1 |
| XONE | 8 | 110929 | -2 |
| HSII | 17 | 111444 | 5 |
| BEDU | 7 | 65735 | 1 |
| WINA | 10 | 86703 | -1 |
| ATRS | 17 | 57189 | -1 |
| BPYU | 7 | 15181 | 0 |
| Average | 9.6 | 63992 | 0.4 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 9.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $64 million. That figure was $3 million in QTT’s case. Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSII) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Tian Ruixiang Holdings Ltd (NASDAQ:TIRX) is the least popular one with only 1 bullish hedge fund positions. Qutoutiao Inc. (NASDAQ:QTT) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for QTT is 28.7. 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. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. 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 17.2% in 2021 through June 11th and surpassed the market again by 3.3 percentage points. Unfortunately QTT wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); QTT investors were disappointed as the stock returned -11.4% since the end of March (through 6/11) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2021.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
