Is BUD A Good Stock To Buy Now?

The 800+ hedge funds and famous money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the third quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of September 30. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund portfolios. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD).

Is BUD a good stock to buy now? Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD) was in 18 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. The all time high for this statistic is 49. BUD investors should pay attention to an increase in hedge fund interest recently. There were 17 hedge funds in our database with BUD holdings at the end of June. Our calculations also showed that BUD 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.

Lee Ainslie of Maverick 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. With all of this in mind let’s review the latest hedge fund action surrounding Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD).

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

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 6% from one quarter earlier. By comparison, 21 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in BUD a year ago. So, let’s examine 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, Fisher Asset Management, managed by Ken Fisher, holds the most valuable position in Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD). Fisher Asset Management has a $403.5 million position in the stock, comprising 0.4% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Gardner Russo & Gardner, managed by Tom Russo, which holds a $331 million position; 3.2% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Remaining members of the smart money that are bullish contain Daniel S. Och’s OZ Management, Renaissance Technologies and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Gardner Russo & Gardner allocated the biggest weight to Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD), around 3.22% of its 13F portfolio. Beddow Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 3.09 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to BUD.

With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, key hedge funds were breaking ground themselves. Maverick Capital, managed by Lee Ainslie, initiated the largest position in Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD). Maverick Capital had $0.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management also initiated a $0.5 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new BUD positions are Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and Matthew Tewksbury’s Stevens Capital Management.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD) but similarly valued. These stocks are PetroChina Company Limited (NYSE:PTR), Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX), Royal Bank of Canada (NYSE:RY), Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC), Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD), GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE:GSK), and Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE). This group of stocks’ market caps are similar to BUD’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 43.7 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $2739 million. That figure was $959 million in BUD’s case. Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand PetroChina Company Limited (NYSE:PTR) is the least popular one with only 6 bullish hedge fund positions. Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (NYSE:BUD) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for BUD is 24.2. 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 30.7% in 2020 through December 14th and still beat the market by 15.8 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on BUD as the stock returned 29.9% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/14) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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