Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS): Are Hedge Funds Right About This Stock?

Is Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS) a buy here? The best stock pickers are getting more optimistic. The number of bullish hedge fund positions increased by 7 recently.

If you’d ask most shareholders, hedge funds are assumed to be worthless, old investment tools of the past. While there are greater than 8000 funds trading at the moment, we choose to focus on the moguls of this club, close to 450 funds. Most estimates calculate that this group has its hands on the majority of the hedge fund industry’s total capital, and by paying attention to their top equity investments, we have come up with a number of investment strategies that have historically outpaced Mr. Market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy beat the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points annually for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve started sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have trumped the S&P 500 index by 25 percentage points in 6.5 month (explore the details and some picks here).

Equally as integral, optimistic insider trading activity is a second way to parse down the investments you’re interested in. Obviously, there are many incentives for a corporate insider to drop shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would initiate a purchase. Plenty of empirical studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this method if piggybackers understand where to look (learn more here).

Now, we’re going to take a peek at the recent action regarding Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS).

What does the smart money think about Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS)?

At year’s end, a total of 21 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of 50% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes substantially.

According to our comprehensive database, Brian Taylor’s Pine River Capital Management had the most valuable position in Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS), worth close to $48 million, accounting for 0.9% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Israel Englander of Millennium Management, with a $46 million position; 0.7% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Remaining hedgies with similar optimism include Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, Anand Parekh’s Alyeska Investment Group and Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors.

Now, some big names have been driving this bullishness. Magnetar Capital, managed by Alec Litowitz and Ross Laser, created the most outsized position in Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS). Magnetar Capital had 15 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies also made a $7 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new HLSS positions are Louis Bacon’s Moore Global Investments, Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management, and J. Alan Reid, Jr.’s Forward Management.

What have insiders been doing with Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS)?

Insider buying is best served when the primary stock in question has experienced transactions within the past half-year. Over the last 180-day time frame, Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS) has seen 4 unique insiders buying, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

With the results shown by our studies, everyday investors must always watch hedge fund and insider trading sentiment, and Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd (NASDAQ:HLSS) is an important part of this process.

Click here to learn more about Insider Monkey’s Hedge Fund Newsletter

Insider Monkey’s small-cap strategy returned 29.2% between September 2012 and February 2013 versus 8.7% for the S&P 500 index. Try it now by clicking the link above.