How Cimpress NV (CMPR) Stacks Up Against Its Peers

There are several ways to beat the market, and investing in small cap stocks has historically been one of them. We like to improve the odds of beating the market further by examining what famous hedge fund operators such as Carl Icahn and George Soros think. Those hedge fund operators make billions of dollars each year by hiring the best and the brightest to do research on stocks, including small cap stocks that big brokerage houses simply don’t cover. Because of Carl Icahn and other successful funds’ exemplary historical records, we pay attention to their small cap picks. In this article, we use hedge fund filing data to analyze Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR) .

Is Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR) a superb stock to buy now? Hedge funds are reducing their bets on the stock. The number of long hedge fund investments went down by 1 recently. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Intrexon Corp (NYSE:XON), Landstar System, Inc. (NASDAQ:LSTR), and Vista Outdoor Inc (NYSE:VSTO) to gather more data points.

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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Hedge fund activity in Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR)

At Q3’s end, a total of 15 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a 6% drop from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 11 hedge funds with a bullish position in CMPR at the beginning of this year, so ownership of the stock is still up this year. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Glenn Greenberg’s Brave Warrior Capital has the largest position in Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR), worth close to $186.4 million, corresponding to 9% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Allan Mecham and Ben Raybould of Arlington Value Capital, with a $180.9 million position; 21% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Other hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions encompass William von Mueffling’s Cantillon Capital Management, Jonathan Auerbach’s Hound Partners, and David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. We should note that Arlington Value Capital is 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.

We already know that not all hedge funds are bullish on the stock and some hedge funds actually cashed in their positions entirely. Interestingly, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group cashed in the largest position of the “upper crust” of funds tracked by Insider Monkey, totaling close to $1.3 million in call options, and Benjamin A. Smith’s Laurion Capital Management was right behind this move, as the fund cut about $1 million worth of shares.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR) but similarly valued. These stocks are Intrexon Corp (NYSE:XON), Landstar System, Inc. (NASDAQ:LSTR), Vista Outdoor Inc (NYSE:VSTO), and XPO Logistics Inc (NYSE:XPO). This group of stocks’ market caps are similar to CMPR’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 18 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $443 million. That figure was $711 million in CMPR’s case. XPO Logistics Inc (NYSE:XPO) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Intrexon Corp (NYSE:XON) is the least popular one with only 10 bullish hedge fund positions. Cimpress NV (NASDAQ:CMPR) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard XPO might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None