Investing in hedge funds can bring large profits, but it’s not for everybody, since hedge funds are available only for high-net-worth individuals. They generate significant returns for investors to justify their large fees and they allocate a lot of time and employ a complex analysis to determine the best stocks to invest in. A particularly interesting group of stocks that hedge funds like is the small-caps. The huge amount of capital does not allow hedge funds to invest a lot in small-caps, but our research showed that their most popular small-cap ideas are less efficiently priced and generate stronger returns than their large- and mega-cap picks and the broader market. That is why we follow the hedge fund activity in the small-cap space.
Hedge fund interest in Mercantile Bank Corp. (NASDAQ:MBWM) shares was flat during the third quarter. This is usually a negative indicator. 6 hedge funds that we track owned the stock on September 30, same as on June 30. At the end of this article we will also compare MBWM to other stocks including Western Asset Mortgage Capital Corp (NYSE:WMC), Monarch Casino & Resort, Inc. (NASDAQ:MCRI), and NewLink Genetics Corp (NASDAQ:NLNK) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Mercantile Bank Corp (NASDAQ:MBWM)
Follow Mercantile Bank Corp (NASDAQ:MBWM)
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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How have hedgies been trading Mercantile Bank Corp. (NASDAQ:MBWM)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 6 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, unchanged from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 7 hedge funds with a bullish position in MBWM at the beginning of this year, so hedge fund interest has slipped slightly in 2016. So, let’s find 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, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, holds the number one position in Mercantile Bank Corp. (NASDAQ:MBWM). Renaissance Technologies has a $17.3 million position in the stock. The second most bullish fund manager is Castine Capital Management, led by Paul Magidson, Jonathan Cohen and Ostrom Enders, holding a $4.6 million position; 2.3% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Some other professional money managers that hold long positions consist of Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, and Peter Algert and Kevin Coldiron’s Algert Coldiron Investors. 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-micro-cap stocks.
