Is CBPO A Good Stock To Buy Now?

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. Insider Monkey finished processing 817 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of September 30th, 2020. What do these smart investors think about China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO)?

Is CBPO a good stock to buy now? The smart money was turning less bullish. The number of bullish hedge fund bets fell by 5 recently. China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO) was in 18 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. The all time high for this statistic is 27. Our calculations also showed that CBPO 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.

Today there are tons of gauges shareholders have at their disposal to analyze stocks. A duo of the most innovative gauges are hedge fund and insider trading sentiment. Our researchers have shown that, historically, those who follow the best picks of the best money managers can outpace the market by a solid margin (see the details here).

Matthew Halbower of Pentwater 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. Keeping this in mind let’s take a gander at the recent hedge fund action surrounding China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO).

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

At third quarter’s end, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -22% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 18 hedge funds with a bullish position in CBPO a year ago. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Hillhouse Capital Management, managed by Lei Zhang, holds the number one position in China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO). Hillhouse Capital Management has a $329.2 million position in the stock, comprising 2.5% of its 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is York Capital Management, managed by James Dinan, which holds a $161.4 million position; 9% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Other peers with similar optimism encompass Manoj Jain and Sohit Khurana’s Maso Capital, Renaissance Technologies and Matthew Halbower’s Pentwater Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Maso Capital allocated the biggest weight to China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO), around 54.82% of its 13F portfolio. Athos Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 14.59 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to CBPO.

Seeing as China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO) has experienced declining sentiment from the smart money, logic holds that there were a few money managers that elected to cut their positions entirely in the third quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Simon Davies’s Sand Grove Capital Partners sold off the largest position of the 750 funds monitored by Insider Monkey, comprising an estimated $35.9 million in stock, and Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners was right behind this move, as the fund said goodbye to about $2.2 million worth. These moves are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest dropped by 5 funds in the third quarter.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Silicon Laboratories (NASDAQ:SLAB), Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co. (NYSE:SHI), Agora, Inc. (NASDAQ:API), Manpowergroup Inc (NYSE:MAN), Cousins Properties Incorporated (NYSE:CUZ), PVH Corp (NYSE:PVH), and Stamps.com Inc. (NASDAQ:STMP). This group of stocks’ market caps are closest to CBPO’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 22.7 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $299 million. That figure was $849 million in CBPO’s case. Manpowergroup Inc (NYSE:MAN) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co. (NYSE:SHI) is the least popular one with only 3 bullish hedge fund positions. China Biologic Products Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:CBPO) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for CBPO is 44.2. 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. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. 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 surpassed the market again by 15.8 percentage points. Unfortunately CBPO wasn’t nearly as popular as these 20 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); CBPO investors were disappointed as the stock returned 6.4% since the end of September (through 12/14) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2020.

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