Is Autodesk (ADSK) Stock A Buy or Sell?

The financial regulations require hedge funds and wealthy investors that exceeded the $100 million holdings threshold to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings to a certain extent level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings disclosed the funds’ positions on December 31st. We at Insider Monkey have made an extensive database of more than 887 of those established hedge funds and famous value investors’ filings. In this article, we analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK) based on those filings.

Is Autodesk (ADSK) stock a buy or sell? Prominent investors were taking an optimistic view. The number of long hedge fund positions went up by 1 lately. Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK) was in 66 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of December. The all time high for this statistic is 67. Our calculations also showed that ADSK isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q4 rankings). There were 65 hedge funds in our database with ADSK holdings at the end of September.

William Von Mueffling of Cantillon Capital Management

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

At Q4’s end, a total of 66 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 2% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards ADSK over the last 22 quarters. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

The largest stake in Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK) was held by Lone Pine Capital, which reported holding $675.6 million worth of stock at the end of December. It was followed by Cantillon Capital Management with a $390.7 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Impax Asset Management, Alkeon Capital Management, and Fisher Asset Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Marlowe Partners allocated the biggest weight to Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK), around 17.41% of its 13F portfolio. Blue Whale Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 8.83 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to ADSK.

Now, key hedge funds have jumped into Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK) headfirst. Balyasny Asset Management, managed by Dmitry Balyasny, initiated the most valuable position in Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK). Balyasny Asset Management had $65.4 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Alok Agrawal’s Bloom Tree Partners also initiated a $44 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new ADSK positions are Josh Resnick’s Jericho Capital Asset Management, Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management, and John Smith Clark’s Southpoint Capital Advisors.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK). We will take a look at The Sherwin-Williams Company (NYSE:SHW), The Bank of Nova Scotia (NYSE:BNS), CME Group Inc (NASDAQ:CME), NetEase, Inc (NASDAQ:NTES), The Southern Company (NYSE:SO), Enbridge Inc (NYSE:ENB), and Intercontinental Exchange Inc (NYSE:ICE). This group of stocks’ market valuations are similar to ADSK’s market valuation.

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As you can see these stocks had an average of 39.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1688 million. That figure was $3528 million in ADSK’s case. CME Group Inc (NASDAQ:CME) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand The Bank of Nova Scotia (NYSE:BNS) is the least popular one with only 19 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK) is more popular among hedge funds. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for ADSK is 85.6. 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 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 81.2% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 26 percentage points. These stocks gained 7% in 2021 through March 12th and still beat the market by 1.6 percentage points. Unfortunately ADSK wasn’t nearly as popular as these 30 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on ADSK were disappointed as the stock returned -12.2% since the end of the fourth quarter (through 3/12) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.

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