Is BOK Financial Corporation (BOKF) A Good Stock To Buy?

Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and successful value investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds’ and successful investors’ positions as of the end of the third quarter. You can find articles about an individual hedge fund’s trades on numerous financial news websites. However, in this article we will take a look at their collective moves over the last 4 years and analyze what the smart money thinks of BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF) based on that data.

Is BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF) ready to rally soon? Investors who are in the know are in a pessimistic mood. The number of long hedge fund positions were cut by 3 lately. Our calculations also showed that BOKF isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 rankings and see the video below for Q2 rankings).

Video: Click the image to watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

If you’d ask most shareholders, hedge funds are seen as slow, outdated investment vehicles of the past. While there are greater than 8000 funds with their doors open at the moment, Our experts look at the masters of this club, about 750 funds. These investment experts preside over the majority of the smart money’s total asset base, and by monitoring their top picks, Insider Monkey has figured out a few investment strategies that have historically beaten Mr. Market. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy exceeded the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points a year since its inception in May 2014. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 27.8% since February 2017 (through November 21st) even though the market was up more than 39% during the same period. We just shared a list of 7 short targets in our latest quarterly update .

Ric Dillon of Diamond Hill Capital

We leave no stone unturned when looking for the next great investment idea. For example Europe is set to become the world’s largest cannabis market, so we check out this European marijuana stock pitch. One of the most bullish analysts in America just put his money where his mouth is. He says, “I’m investing more today than I did back in early 2009.” So we check out his pitch. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. We also rely on the best performing hedge funds‘ buy/sell signals. We’re going to take a peek at the key hedge fund action regarding BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF).

How have hedgies been trading BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 16 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -16% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 16 hedge funds with a bullish position in BOKF a year ago. So, let’s check out 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, Ariel Investments, managed by John W. Rogers, holds the biggest position in BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF). Ariel Investments has a $92.1 million position in the stock, comprising 1.2% of its 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Diamond Hill Capital, managed by Ric Dillon, which holds a $49.8 million position; 0.3% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Remaining peers with similar optimism include Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates, Renaissance Technologies and Phil Frohlich’s Prescott Group Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Ariel Investments allocated the biggest weight to BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF), around 1.23% of its 13F portfolio. Prescott Group Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 0.49 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to BOKF.

Due to the fact that BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF) has experienced falling interest from hedge fund managers, it’s safe to say that there exists a select few hedgies who were dropping their full holdings last quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group dumped the biggest investment of all the hedgies tracked by Insider Monkey, totaling about $2.2 million in stock, and Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners was right behind this move, as the fund sold off about $1.4 million worth. These bearish behaviors are important to note, as total hedge fund interest fell by 3 funds last quarter.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF). These stocks are MDU Resources Group Inc (NYSE:MDU), Axis Capital Holdings Limited (NYSE:AXS), Sarepta Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:SRPT), and World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:WWE). This group of stocks’ market valuations match BOKF’s market valuation.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 29 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $819 million. That figure was $189 million in BOKF’s case. World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:WWE) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand MDU Resources Group Inc (NYSE:MDU) is the least popular one with only 21 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:BOKF) is even less popular than MDU. Our calculations showed that top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 37.4% in 2019 through the end of November and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 9.9 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on BOKF, though not to the same extent, as the stock returned 5.9% during the fourth quarter (through 11/30) and outperformed the market as well.

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