Is Gildan Activewear Inc (USA) (GIL) 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. What do these smart investors think about Gildan Activewear Inc (USA) (NYSE:GIL)?

Is Gildan Activewear Inc (USA) (NYSE:GIL) the right investment to pursue these days? Hedge funds are indeed becoming less confident. The number of long hedge fund bets contracted by 3 in recent months. There were 10 hedge funds in our database with GIL positions at the end of the 2016 third quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare GIL to other stocks including American Capital Agency Corp. (NASDAQ:AGNC), FMC Corp (NYSE:FMC), and SS and C Technologies Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:SSNC) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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.

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Now, let’s take a glance at the latest action encompassing Gildan Activewear Inc (USA) (NYSE:GIL).

How have hedgies been trading Gildan Activewear Inc (USA) (NYSE:GIL)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 10 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a decline of 23% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 16 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in GIL heading into this year. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Greg Poole’s Echo Street Capital Management has the biggest position in Gildan Activewear Inc (USA) (NYSE:GIL), worth close to $27.6 million, amounting to 1.2% of its total 13F portfolio. On Echo Street Capital Management’s heels is D E Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, holding an $18.1 million position. Remaining members of the smart money with similar optimism comprise Gregg J. Powers’s Private Capital Management, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies. 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.