Here’s What Hedge Funds Think About Wabash National Corporation (WNC)

The government requires hedge funds and wealthy investors that crossed the $100 million equity holdings threshold are required to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings disclosed the funds’ positions on March 31. We at Insider Monkey have made an extensive database of nearly 750 of those elite funds and famous investors’ filings. In this article, we analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC) based on those filings.

Is Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC) a buy right now? Money managers are taking a pessimistic view. The number of long hedge fund bets were trimmed by 4 lately. Our calculations also showed that wnc isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds. WNC was in 16 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. There were 20 hedge funds in our database with WNC positions at the end of the previous quarter.

In the eyes of most shareholders, hedge funds are seen as slow, outdated investment vehicles of years past. While there are more than 8000 funds with their doors open at present, Our experts choose to focus on the moguls of this club, around 750 funds. These investment experts have their hands on the lion’s share of the hedge fund industry’s total capital, and by keeping an eye on their first-class stock picks, Insider Monkey has formulated a number of investment strategies that have historically defeated Mr. Market. Insider Monkey’s flagship hedge fund strategy exceeded the S&P 500 index by around 5 percentage points per annum since its inception in May 2014 through June 18th. We were able to generate large returns even by identifying short candidates. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 28.2% since February 2017 (through June 18th) even though the market was up nearly 30% during the same period. We just shared a list of 5 short targets in our latest quarterly update and they are already down an average of 8.2% in a month whereas our long picks outperformed the market by 2.5 percentage points in this volatile 5 week period (our long picks also beat the market by 15 percentage points so far this year).

Noam Gottesman, GLG Partners

Let’s review the latest hedge fund action regarding Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC).

What have hedge funds been doing with Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC)?

Heading into the second quarter of 2019, a total of 16 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -20% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards WNC over the last 15 quarters. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

Among these funds, Royce & Associates held the most valuable stake in Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC), which was worth $39.3 million at the end of the first quarter. On the second spot was Renaissance Technologies which amassed $9.1 million worth of shares. Moreover, GLG Partners, Citadel Investment Group, and Millennium Management were also bullish on Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC), allocating a large percentage of their portfolios to this stock.

Judging by the fact that Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC) has experienced declining sentiment from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, it’s safe to say that there is a sect of money managers that slashed their positions entirely last quarter. Intriguingly, David Harding’s Winton Capital Management said goodbye to the largest position of all the hedgies monitored by Insider Monkey, worth close to $6.8 million in stock. Peter Algert and Kevin Coldiron’s fund, Algert Coldiron Investors, also cut its stock, about $0.8 million worth. These transactions are interesting, as total hedge fund interest dropped by 4 funds last quarter.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC). These stocks are NV5 Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVEE), Mammoth Energy Services, Inc. (NASDAQ:TUSK), NanoString Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:NSTG), and DMC Global Inc. (NASDAQ:BOOM). All of these stocks’ market caps resemble WNC’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 15.75 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $161 million. That figure was $68 million in WNC’s case. NanoString Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:NSTG) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand NV5 Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVEE) is the least popular one with only 10 bullish hedge fund positions. Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our calculations showed that top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 6.2% in Q2 through June 19th and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by nearly 3 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on WNC as the stock returned 11.9% during the same period and outperformed the market by an even larger margin. Hedge funds were rewarded for their relative bullishness.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.