Insider Monkey finished processing more than 738 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of March 31st, 2019. In this article we are going to take a look at smart money sentiment towards Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN).
Is Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN) a splendid investment today? Investors who are in the know are buying. The number of long hedge fund positions improved by 1 lately. Our calculations also showed that GTN isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
Why do we pay any attention at all to hedge fund sentiment? Our research has shown that hedge funds’ large-cap stock picks indeed failed to beat the market between 1999 and 2016. However, we were able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the market by 40 percentage points since May 2014 through May 30, 2019 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that’ll significantly underperform the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 30.9% through May 30, 2019. That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.
We’re going to take a look at the fresh hedge fund action surrounding Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN).
Hedge fund activity in Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN)
At Q1’s end, a total of 27 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 4% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 26 hedge funds with a bullish position in GTN a year ago. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Darsana Capital Partners, managed by Anand Desai, holds the biggest position in Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN). Darsana Capital Partners has a $170.9 million position in the stock, comprising 6.4% of its 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Renaissance Technologies, managed by Jim Simons, which holds a $25.7 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other members of the smart money with similar optimism comprise Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital, D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw and Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors.
As industrywide interest jumped, key hedge funds have jumped into Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN) headfirst. D E Shaw, managed by D. E. Shaw, assembled the largest position in Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN). D E Shaw had $11.5 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Ira Unschuld’s Brant Point Investment Management also initiated a $2.1 million position during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new GTN investors: Hoon Kim’s Quantinno Capital, David Harding’s Winton Capital Management, and Michael Platt and William Reeves’s BlueCrest Capital Mgmt..
Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Enerplus Corp (NYSE:ERF), Mack Cali Realty Corp (NYSE:CLI), Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ:PRGS), and Altra Industrial Motion Corp. (NASDAQ:AIMC). All of these stocks’ market caps are closest to GTN’s market cap.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| ERF | 21 | 160880 | 3 |
| CLI | 11 | 132523 | 2 |
| PRGS | 24 | 257769 | 2 |
| AIMC | 22 | 309252 | 1 |
| Average | 19.5 | 215106 | 2 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 19.5 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $215 million. That figure was $303 million in GTN’s case. Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ:PRGS) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Mack Cali Realty Corp (NYSE:CLI) is the least popular one with only 11 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN) is more popular among hedge funds. Our calculations showed that top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 1.9% in Q2 through May 30th and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by more than 3 percentage points. Unfortunately GTN wasn’t nearly as popular as these 20 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on GTN were disappointed as the stock returned -16.1% during the same period and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds as 13 of these stocks already outperformed the market in Q2.
Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
