The Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) has shot up by 38% since hitting a 52-week low on February 11, easily outdistancing the S&P 500 ETF (SPY)’s 19% gains during that time. Nor is the small-cap rally likely to be over. History shows that after periods of 15% or greater declines in the Russell 2000 ETF, it has responded with average gains of nearly 100%. In fact, only once did the rebound run come in below 60% gains. It’s no wonder then that hedge funds appear to be aggressively putting their money back into small-cap stocks. In this article, we’ll look at their Q3 trading habits in regards to Biogen Idec Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB).
Is Biogen Idec Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB) a buy here? Investors who are in the know are unmistakably turning bullish. The number of long hedge fund investments strengthened by 8 lately. In this way, there were 81 hedge funds in our database with BIIB positions at the end of the third quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare BIIB to other stocks including Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc (ADR) (NYSE:MTU), Avago Technologies Ltd (NASDAQ:AVGO), and Mondelez International Inc (NASDAQ:MDLZ) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB)
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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.
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How are hedge funds trading Biogen Idec Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB)?
At Q3’s end, a total of 81 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, up by 11% from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 71 hedge funds with a bullish position in BIIB at the beginning of this year. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Viking Global, led by Andreas Halvorsen, holds the biggest position in Biogen Idec Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB). Viking Global has a $684.4 million position in the stock, comprising 3% of its 13F portfolio. On Viking Global’s heels is D E Shaw, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, with a $504.4 million position. Other members of the smart money that are bullish include Samuel Isaly’s OrbiMed Advisors, and Cliff Asness’ AQR 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-microcap stocks.
