How Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (BLVD) Stacks Up Against Its Peers

Legendary investors such as Leon Cooperman and Seth Klarman earn enormous amounts of money for themselves and their investors by doing in-depth research on small-cap stocks that big brokerage houses don’t publish. Small cap stocks -especially when they are screened well- can generate substantial outperformance versus a boring index fund. That’s why we analyze the activity of those successful funds in these small-cap stocks. In the following paragraphs, we analyze Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ:BLVD) from the perspective of those successful funds.

Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ:BLVD) shares didn’t see a lot of action during the third quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 11 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. At the end of this article we will also compare BLVD to other stocks including Catchmark Timber Trust Inc (NYSE:CTT), NewStar Financial Inc (NASDAQ:NEWS), and Everbridge Inc (NASDAQ:EVBG) to get a better sense of its popularity.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

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With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at the latest action surrounding Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ:BLVD).

What does the smart money think about Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ:BLVD)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 11 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 0% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 8 hedge funds with a bullish position in BLVD at the beginning of this year. So, let’s check out 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, Arrowgrass Capital Partners, led by Nick Niell, holds the most valuable position in Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ:BLVD). Arrowgrass Capital Partners has a $20.4 million position in the stock, comprising 0.3% of its 13F portfolio. On Arrowgrass Capital Partners’s heels is Anand Parekh of Alyeska Investment Group, with a $18.6 million position; the fund has 0.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other professional money managers with similar optimism include Jeffrey Tannenbaum’s Fir Tree, Andrew Weiss’s Weiss Asset Management and Neil Chriss’s Hutchin Hill Capital. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.

Earlier we told you that the aggregate hedge fund interest in the stock was unchanged and we view this as a negative development. Even though there weren’t any hedge funds dumping their holdings during the third quarter, there weren’t any hedge funds initiating brand new positions. This indicates that hedge funds, at the very best, perceive this stock as dead money and they haven’t identified any viable catalysts that can attract investor attention.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ:BLVD). We will take a look at Catchmark Timber Trust Inc (NYSE:CTT), NewStar Financial Inc (NASDAQ:NEWS), Everbridge Inc (NASDAQ:EVBG), and Century Communities, Inc (NYSE:CCS). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to BLVD’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 10.75 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $64 million. That figure was $146 million in BLVD’s case. Century Communities, Inc (NYSE:CCS) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand NewStar Financial Inc (NASDAQ:NEWS) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Boulevard Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ:BLVD) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard CCS might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.