Is HAS Stock A Buy or Sell?

Many prominent investors, including Warren Buffett, David Tepper and Stan Druckenmiller, have been cautious regarding the current bull market and missed out as the stock market reached another high in recent weeks. On the other hand, technology hedge funds weren’t timid and registered double digit market beating gains. Financials, energy and industrial stocks initially suffered the most but many of these stocks delivered strong returns since November and hedge funds actually increased their positions in these stocks. In this article we will find out how hedge fund sentiment towards Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) changed recently.

Is HAS stock a buy? Prominent investors were in a bullish mood. The number of bullish hedge fund positions increased by 5 lately. Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) was in 36 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. The all time high for this statistic is 36. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. Our calculations also showed that HAS isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q4 rankings).

Ryan Tolkin, CIO of Schonfeld Strategic Advisors

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

At Q4’s end, a total of 36 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 16% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 36 hedge funds with a bullish position in HAS a year ago. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

The largest stake in Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) was held by Alyeska Investment Group, which reported holding $68.2 million worth of stock at the end of December. It was followed by Candlestick Capital Management with a $42.9 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Interval Partners, Scopus Asset Management, and Sirios Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Deep Field Asset Management allocated the biggest weight to Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS), around 2.61% of its 13F portfolio. Six Columns Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 1.99 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to HAS.

With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, specific money managers have jumped into Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) headfirst. Interval Partners, managed by Gregg Moskowitz, assembled the biggest position in Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS). Interval Partners had $37.6 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital also initiated a $17.4 million position during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Brad Stephens’s Six Columns Capital, Doug Gordon, Jon Hilsabeck and Don Jabro’s Shellback Capital, and Ryan Tolkin (CIO)’s Schonfeld Strategic Advisors.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS). These stocks are Elastic N.V. (NYSE:ESTC), C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRW), United Airlines Holdings Inc (NYSE:UAL), Franklin Resources, Inc. (NYSE:BEN), FactSet Research Systems Inc. (NYSE:FDS), China Southern Airlines Co Ltd (NYSE:ZNH), and Molina Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE:MOH). This group of stocks’ market valuations are similar to HAS’s market valuation.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 31.9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $847 million. That figure was $356 million in HAS’s case. United Airlines Holdings Inc (NYSE:UAL) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand China Southern Airlines Co Ltd (NYSE:ZNH) is the least popular one with only 3 bullish hedge fund positions. Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for HAS is 73.7. 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 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 81.2% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 26 percentage points. These stocks gained 7.9% in 2021 through April 1st and beat the market again by 0.4 percentage points. Unfortunately HAS wasn’t nearly as popular as these 30 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on HAS were disappointed as the stock returned 2.8% since the end of December (through 4/1) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds as many of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.

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

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