Is Carlisle Companies Inc. (CSL) A Good Stock To Buy?

Insider Monkey finished processing more than 700 13F filings made by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of September 30. In this article we are going to take a look at smart money sentiment towards Carlisle Companies, Inc. (NYSE:CSL).

Is Carlisle Companies, Inc. (NYSE:CSL) a buy, sell, or hold? Money managers are betting on the stock. The number of bullish hedge fund bets improved by 2 lately. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS), News Corp (NASDAQ:NWS), and Targa Resources Corp (NYSE:TRGP) to gather more data points.

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.

How have hedgies been trading Carlisle Companies, Inc. (NYSE:CSL)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 24 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a 9% jump from the previous quarter. Hedge fund ownership of CSL has remained in an extremely narrow range during the past five 13F reporting periods, with between 22 and 24 funds long the stock during each period. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management has the most valuable position in Carlisle Companies, Inc. (NYSE:CSL), worth close to $74.1 million. Coming in second is Robert Joseph Caruso of Select Equity Group, with a $62.7 million position. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors that are bullish comprise Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Anand Parekh’s Alyeska Investment Group and Matthew Lindenbaum’s Basswood Capital.