Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.
Is TriCo Bancshares (NASDAQ:TCBK) a buy, sell, or hold? Prominent investors are really betting on the stock. The number of long hedge fund positions improved by 1 lately. TCBK was in 7 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 6 hedge funds in our database with TCBK holdings at the end of the second quarter. 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 Green Plains Partners LP (NASDAQ:GPP), Crocs, Inc. (NASDAQ:CROX), and CTS Corporation (NYSE:CTS) to gather more data points.
Follow Trico Bancshares (NASDAQ:TCBK)
Follow Trico Bancshares (NASDAQ:TCBK)
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.
Zadorozhnyi Viktor/Shutterstock.com
How have hedgies been trading TriCo Bancshares (NASDAQ:TCBK)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 7 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a 17% increase from one quarter earlier. By comparison, 10 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in TCBK heading into this year, so hedge fund ownership of the stock is still down in 2016. So, let’s review 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, has the biggest position in TriCo Bancshares (NASDAQ:TCBK), worth close to $16.6 million. The second most bullish fund manager is Matthew Lindenbaum of Basswood Capital, with a $3.7 million position. Remaining peers with similar optimism contain Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital 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.
