Is BrightView Holdings, Inc. (BV) A Good Stock To Buy?

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. We at Insider Monkey have plowed through 873 13F filings that hedge funds and well-known value investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of June 30th. In this article we look at what those investors think of BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV).

Is BV a good stock to buy? The smart money was selling. The number of long hedge fund positions shrunk by 1 in recent months. BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV) was in 10 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of June. The all time high for this statistic is 24. Our calculations also showed that BV isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

In the financial world there are a large number of tools investors have at their disposal to grade stocks. A pair of the most under-the-radar tools are hedge fund and insider trading indicators. We have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the best fund managers can outperform the broader indices by a solid amount. Insider Monkey’s monthly stock picks returned 185.4% since March 2017 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 79 percentage points (see the details here). That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is a 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, lithium mining is one of the fastest growing industries right now, so we are checking out stock pitches like this emerging lithium stock. We go through lists like the 10 best EV stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. 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 homepage. Now let’s review the new hedge fund action encompassing BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV).

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

At the end of June, a total of 10 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -9% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 18 hedge funds with a bullish position in BV a year ago. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Marc Lisker, Glenn Fuhrman and John Phelan’s MSDC Management has the biggest position in BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV), worth close to $190.4 million, accounting for 9.7% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell of Arrowstreet Capital, with a $6.9 million position; less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism include Joseph Samuels’s Islet Management, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position MSDC Management allocated the biggest weight to BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV), around 9.71% of its 13F portfolio. Islet Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.06 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to BV.

Due to the fact that BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV) has experienced bearish sentiment from the smart money, it’s easy to see that there exists a select few hedgies who were dropping their positions entirely in the second quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp said goodbye to the largest investment of the “upper crust” of funds monitored by Insider Monkey, comprising close to $4.6 million in stock, and Mark Broach’s Manatuck Hill Partners was right behind this move, as the fund sold off about $3.2 million worth. These moves are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest dropped by 1 funds in the second quarter.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV) but similarly valued. We will take a look at New York Mortgage Trust, Inc. (NASDAQ:NYMT), Textainer Group Holdings Limited (NYSE:TGH), Stratasys, Ltd. (NASDAQ:SSYS), Bottomline Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:EPAY), The E.W. Scripps Company (NASDAQ:SSP), La-Z-Boy Incorporated (NYSE:LZB), and Oxford Industries, Inc. (NYSE:OXM). This group of stocks’ market caps resemble BV’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 18.9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $146 million. That figure was $206 million in BV’s case. Bottomline Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:EPAY) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Oxford Industries, Inc. (NYSE:OXM) is the least popular one with only 14 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV) is even less popular than OXM. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for BV is 16.5. 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. Hedge funds dodged a bullet by taking a bearish stance towards BV. Our calculations showed that the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 25.7% in 2021 through September 27th but managed to beat the market again by 6.2 percentage points. Unfortunately BV wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was very bearish); BV investors were disappointed as the stock returned -6% since the end of the second quarter (through 9/27) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.

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