Is Global Payments Inc (GPN) A Good Stock To Buy?

With the second-quarter round of 13F filings behind us it is time to take a look at the stocks in which some of the best money managers in the world preferred to invest or sell heading into the third quarter of 2021. One of these stocks was Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN).

Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN) investors should be aware of an increase in support from the world’s most elite money managers of late. Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN) was in 66 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of June. The all time high for this statistic is 68. There were 62 hedge funds in our database with GPN holdings at the end of March. Our calculations also showed that GPN isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

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

At the end of the second quarter, a total of 66 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 6% from the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in GPN over the last 24 quarters. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Lone Pine Capital, holds the largest position in Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN). Lone Pine Capital has a $1.0394 billion position in the stock, comprising 3.3% of its 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Matrix Capital Management, managed by David Goel and Paul Ferri, which holds a $461.8 million position; 5% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Remaining professional money managers that are bullish contain Panayotis Takis Sparaggis’s Alkeon Capital Management, Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Joho Capital allocated the biggest weight to Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN), around 15.91% of its 13F portfolio. Value Holdings LP is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 8.41 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to GPN.

As industrywide interest jumped, key money managers have jumped into Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN) headfirst. Steadfast Capital Management, managed by Robert Pitts, assembled the most valuable call position in Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN). Steadfast Capital Management had $82.9 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Renaissance Technologies also initiated a $62.2 million position during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Lee Ainslie’s Maverick Capital, Dennis Puri and Oliver Keller’s Hunt Lane Capital, and Robert Pohly’s Samlyn Capital.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN). These stocks are Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), Banco Bradesco SA (NYSE:BBD), DocuSign, Inc. (NASDAQ:DOCU), Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (NYSE:FCX), Ambev SA (NYSE:ABEV), BioNTech SE (NASDAQ:BNTX), and Aon plc (NYSE:AON). This group of stocks’ market values match GPN’s market value.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 49.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $3412 million. That figure was $4858 million in GPN’s case. Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Banco Bradesco SA (NYSE:BBD) is the least popular one with only 18 bullish hedge fund positions. Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for GPN is 71.9. 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 positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. Our calculations showed that top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 25.7% in 2021 through September 27th and beat the market again by 6.2 percentage points. Unfortunately GPN wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on GPN were disappointed as the stock returned -12.6% since the end of June (through 9/27) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as many of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.

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

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