In the eyes of many traders, hedge funds are assumed to be delayed, outdated financial tools of an era lost to time. Although there are more than 8,000 hedge funds with their doors open today, this site focuses on the top tier of this group, around 525 funds. Analysts calculate that this group controls the majority of all hedge funds’ total capital, and by paying attention to their highest performing equity investments, we’ve come up with a number of investment strategies that have historically beaten Mr. Market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outperformed the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per annum for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve started sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have outperformed the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (find a sample of our picks).
Equally as necessary, bullish insider trading sentiment is a second way to analyze the marketplace. There are plenty of stimuli for an executive to downsize shares of his or her company, but just one, very clear reason why they would buy. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this tactic if “monkeys” know where to look (learn more here).
What’s more, we’re going to analyze the latest info for Intersil Corp (NASDAQ:ISIL).
Hedge fund activity in Intersil Corp (NASDAQ:ISIL)
In preparation for the third quarter, a total of 7 of the hedge funds we track were bullish in this stock, a change of -36% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes considerably.
As Intersil Corp (NASDAQ:ISIL) has experienced declining interest from the smart money’s best and brightest, we can see that there was a specific group of money managers who were dropping their full holdings last quarter. At the top of the heap, Peter Rathjens Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital dumped the largest position of the 450+ funds we watch, valued at close to $4.1 million in stock. Cliff Asness’s fund, AQR Capital Management, also dumped its stock, about $1.7 million worth. These bearish behaviors are important to note, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 4 funds last quarter.
Insider trading activity in Intersil Corp (NASDAQ:ISIL)
Insider buying is most useful when the company we’re looking at has experienced transactions within the past half-year. Over the latest 180-day time period, Intersil Corp (NASDAQ:ISIL) has experienced zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
We’ll check out the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Intersil Corp (NASDAQ:ISIL). These stocks are Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE:AMD), M/A-COM Technology Solutions Holdings (NASDAQ:MTSI), Cypress Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ:CY), Spreadtrum Communications, Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:SPRD), and Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDTI). This group of stocks belong to the semiconductor – broad line industry and their market caps are similar to ISIL’s market cap.
