How Renasant Corp. (RNST) Stacks Up Against Its Peers

The successful funds run by legendary investors such as Dan Loeb and David Tepper make hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves and their investors by spending enormous resources doing research on small cap stocks that big investment banks don’t follow. Because of their pay structures, they have strong incentive to do the research necessary to beat the market. That’s why we pay close attention to what they think in small cap stocks. In this article, we take a closer look at Renasant Corp. (NASDAQ:RNST) from the perspective of those successful funds.

Is Renasant Corp. (NASDAQ:RNST) a buy at the moment? Investors who are in the know are actually turning less bullish. The number of long hedge fund bets that are revealed through 13F filings retreated by 2 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 First Interstate Bancsystem Inc (NASDAQ:FIBK), Restoration Hardware Holdings Inc (NYSE:RH), and The Navigators Group, Inc (NASDAQ:NAVG) 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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How have hedgies been trading Renasant Corp. (NASDAQ:RNST)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 9 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a drop of 18% from one quarter earlier. By comparison, 7 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in RNST heading into this year, which is still up by 2 in 2016. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, holds the most valuable position in Renasant Corp. (NASDAQ:RNST). Renaissance Technologies has a $26.7 million position in the stock. On Renaissance Technologies’ heels is Balyasny Asset Management, led by Dmitry Balyasny, which holds a $4.5 million position. Other professional money managers that hold long positions contain Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors. 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.