Is Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (GPI) 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 Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (NYSE:GPI).

Is Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (NYSE:GPI) undervalued? Prominent investors are getting less optimistic. The number of bullish hedge fund bets fell by 1 recently. GPI was in 19 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 20 hedge funds in our database with GPI holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare GPI to other stocks including Loral Space & Communications Ltd. (NASDAQ:LORL), Adeptus Health Inc (NYSE:ADPT), and Flow International Corporation (NASDAQ:FLOW) 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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How are hedge funds trading Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (NYSE:GPI)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 19 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a drop of 5% from the second quarter of 2016, as hedge fund ownership of the stock wallows around its yearly low point. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Ricky Sandler’s Eminence Capital has the largest position in Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (NYSE:GPI), worth close to $115.7 million, accounting for 1.9% of its total 13F portfolio. On Eminence Capital’s heels is Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson of Adage Capital Management, with a $53.4 million position. Other members of the smart money with similar optimism encompass Anthony Bozza’s Lakewood Capital Management, Steven Richman’s East Side Capital (RR Partners), and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.