Is ANAT A Good Stock To Buy Now?

Our extensive research has shown that imitating the smart money can generate significant returns for retail investors, which is why we track nearly 817 active prominent money managers and analyze their quarterly 13F filings. The stocks that are heavily bought by hedge funds historically outperformed the market, though there is no shortage of high profile failures like hedge funds’ 2018 losses in Facebook and Apple. Let’s take a closer look at what the funds we track think about American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT) in this article.

Is ANAT a good stock to buy now? American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT) has experienced an increase in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds lately. American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT) was in 12 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2020. The all time high for this statistics is 17. There were 10 hedge funds in our database with ANAT holdings at the end of June. Our calculations also showed that ANAT isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks).

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 66 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that’ll significantly underperform the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 13% through November 17th. That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.

Michael Gelband of ExodusPoint Capital

At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 15 best blue chip stocks to pick the best large-cap stocks to buy. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our website. Keeping this in mind let’s take a glance at the new hedge fund action regarding American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT).

Do Hedge Funds Think ANAT Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At Q3’s end, a total of 12 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 20% from the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in ANAT over the last 21 quarters. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Among these funds, Renaissance Technologies held the most valuable stake in American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT), which was worth $14.2 million at the end of the third quarter. On the second spot was Arrowstreet Capital which amassed $4.4 million worth of shares. Citadel Investment Group, Winton Capital Management, and AQR Capital Management were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Winton Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT), around 0.09% of its 13F portfolio. Elkhorn Partners is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.03 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to ANAT.

As industrywide interest jumped, key hedge funds have jumped into American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT) headfirst. ExodusPoint Capital, managed by Michael Gelband, assembled the most outsized position in American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT). ExodusPoint Capital had $1.3 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Thomas Bailard’s Bailard Inc also made a $0.3 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new ANAT investors: Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners and Alan S. Parsow’s Elkhorn Partners.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT). These stocks are IAMGOLD Corporation (NYSE:IAG), Investors Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:ISBC), Ambarella Inc (NASDAQ:AMBA), Euronav NV (NYSE:EURN), Barnes Group Inc. (NYSE:B), Enable Midstream Partners LP (NYSE:ENBL), and Callaway Golf Company (NYSE:ELY). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to ANAT’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 19.7 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $141 million. That figure was $30 million in ANAT’s case. Ambarella Inc (NASDAQ:AMBA) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Enable Midstream Partners LP (NYSE:ENBL) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. American National Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANAT) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for ANAT is 41.5. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. Our calculations showed that top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.3% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10 percentage points. These stocks gained 32.9% in 2020 through December 8th and still beat the market by 16.2 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on ANAT as the stock returned 29.2% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/8) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.