Reputable billionaire investors such as Nelson Peltz and David Tepper generate exorbitant profits for their wealthy accredited investors (a minimum of $1 million in investable assets would be required to invest in a hedge fund and most successful hedge funds won’t accept your savings unless you commit at least $5 million) by pinpointing winning small-cap stocks. There is little or no publicly-available information at all on some of these small companies, which makes it hard for an individual investor to pin down a winner within the small-cap space. However, hedge funds and other big asset managers can do the due diligence and analysis for you instead, thanks to their highly-skilled research teams and vast resources to conduct an appropriate evaluation process. Looking for potential winners within the small-cap galaxy of stocks? We believe following the smart money is a good starting point.
STAAR Surgical Company (NASDAQ:STAA) shares didn’t see a lot of action during the third quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 8 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September, same as at the end of June. At the end of this article we will also compare STAA to other stocks including Arbor Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE:ABR), The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW), and Moneygram International Inc (NYSE:MGI) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Staar Surgical Co (NASDAQ:STAA)
Follow Staar Surgical Co (NASDAQ:STAA)
We follow over 700 hedge funds and other institutional investors and by analyzing their quarterly 13F filings, we identify stocks that they are collectively bullish on and develop investment strategies based on this data. One strategy that outperformed the market over the last year involves selecting the 100 best-performing funds and identifying the 30 mid-cap stocks that they are collectively most bullish on. Over the past year, this strategy generated returns of 18%, topping the 8% gain registered by S&P 500 ETFs. We launched this strategy 2.5 years ago and it returned more than 39% since then, vs. 22% gain registered by the S&P 500 ETFs.
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How have hedgies been trading STAAR Surgical Company (NASDAQ:STAA)?
At Q3’s end, a total of 8 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, unchanged from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in the number of bullish hedge fund positions in STAA over the last 5 quarters, which rose by 50% between September 30, 2015 and March 31, 2016. 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 Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Broadwood Capital, led by Neal C. Bradsher, holds the largest position in STAAR Surgical Company (NASDAQ:STAA). Broadwood Capital has a $102 million position in the stock, comprising 17.5% of its 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is William Leland Edwards of Palo Alto Investors, with a $30.5 million position; 1.8% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Other professional money managers that are bullish contain Constantinos J. Christofilis’ Archon Capital Management, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, and Mark Coe’s Coe Capital Management. 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.
