Should Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN) investors track the following data?
In the financial world, there are tons of methods market participants can use to monitor the equity markets. A couple of the most useful are hedge fund and insider trading activity. At Insider Monkey, our studies have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the top fund managers can outperform the market by a significant margin (see just how much).
Just as key, bullish insider trading sentiment is another way to look at the stock market universe. Obviously, there are lots of incentives for a corporate insider to downsize shares of his or her company, but just one, very clear reason why they would behave bullishly. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the impressive potential of this tactic if “monkeys” know where to look (learn more here).
Thus, it’s important to study the recent info surrounding Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN).
How have hedgies been trading Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN)?
In preparation for the third quarter, a total of 7 of the hedge funds we track were bullish in this stock, a change of 0% from the first quarter. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes meaningfully.
When using filings from the hedgies we track, Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates had the most valuable position in Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN), worth close to $45.4 million, accounting for 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. On Royce & Associates’s heels is GAMCO Investors, managed by Mario Gabelli, which held a $2.5 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other peers that hold long positions include D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies.
Judging by the fact that Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN) has experienced dropping sentiment from the smart money’s best and brightest, it’s easy to see that there was a specific group of hedge funds that decided to sell off their positions entirely in Q1. Intriguingly, Joel Greenblatt’s Gotham Asset Management dumped the biggest stake of all the hedgies we watch, totaling about $0.6 million in stock. Matthew Hulsizer’s fund, PEAK6 Capital Management, also dropped its stock, about $0.2 million worth. These bearish behaviors are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest stayed the same (this is a bearish signal in our experience).
What have insiders been doing with Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN)?
Bullish insider trading is best served when the company we’re looking at has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the latest six-month time period, Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN) has experienced zero unique insiders buying, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
We’ll also examine the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Raven Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:RAVN). These stocks are Park Electrochemical Corp. (NYSE:PKE), TTM Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTMI), Plexus Corp. (NASDAQ:PLXS), Benchmark Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:BHE), and Celestica Inc. (USA) (NYSE:CLS). All of these stocks are in the printed circuit boards industry and their market caps resemble RAVN’s market cap.
