World-class money managers like Ken Griffin and Barry Rosenstein only invest their wealthy clients’ money after undertaking a rigorous examination of any potential stock. They are particularly successful in this regard when it comes to small-cap stocks, which their peerless research gives them a big information advantage on when it comes to judging their worth. It’s not surprising then that they generate their biggest returns from these stocks and invest more of their money in these stocks on average than other investors. It’s also not surprising then that we pay close attention to these picks ourselves and have built a market-beating investment strategy around them.
Is IDEX Corporation (NYSE:IEX) a healthy stock for your portfolio? The smart money is becoming more confident. The number of long hedge fund positions that are disclosed in regulatory 13F filings improved by 2 recently. IEX was in 16 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 14 hedge funds in our database with IEX positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare IEX to other stocks including Taro Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE:TARO), Lennox International Inc. (NYSE:LII), and Reinsurance Group of America Inc (NYSE:RGA) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Idex Corp (NYSE:IEX)
Follow Idex Corp (NYSE:IEX)
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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Hedge fund activity in IDEX Corporation (NYSE:IEX)
Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 16 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a gain of 14% from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 15 hedge funds with a bullish position in IEX at the beginning of this year. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, GAMCO Investors, led by Mario Gabelli, holds the most valuable position in IDEX Corporation (NYSE:IEX). GAMCO Investors has a $67.7 million position in the stock. Coming in second is Ian Simm of Impax Asset Management, with a $64.1 million position; the fund has 2.9% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining members of the smart money that hold long positions consist of John W. Rogers’ Ariel Investments, Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates and Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies. We should note that Impax Asset Management is 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.
