Is Core-Mark Holding Company, Inc. (CORE) A Good Stock To Buy?

The 700+ hedge funds and 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 positions. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards Core-Mark Holding Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:CORE) .

Core-Mark Holding Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:CORE) investors should be aware of a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money of late. There were 17 hedge funds in our database with CORE positions at the end of the previous quarter. 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 Wageworks Inc (NYSE:WAGE), First Financial Bankshares Inc (NASDAQ:FFIN), and TCF Financial Corporation (NYSE:TCB) 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.

Steve Buckley/Shutterstock.com

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at the fresh action encompassing Core-Mark Holding Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:CORE).

How have hedgies been trading Core-Mark Holding Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:CORE)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a decline of 18% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 13 hedge funds with a bullish position in CORE at the beginning of this year. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Royce & Associates, led by Chuck Royce, holds the number one position in Core-Mark Holding Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:CORE). According to regulatory filings, the fund has a $33.8 million position in the stock, comprising 0.2% of its 13F portfolio. On Royce & Associates’s heels is Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies with a $6.4 million position; less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Some other peers with similar optimism include Charles Paquelet’s Skylands Capital, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.