The worries about the election and the ongoing uncertainty about the path of interest-rate increases have been keeping investors on the sidelines. Of course, most hedge funds and other asset managers have been underperforming main stock market indices since the middle of 2015. Interestingly though, smaller-cap stocks registered their best performance relative to the large-capitalization stocks since the end of the June quarter, suggesting that this may be the best time to take a cue from their stock picks. In fact, the Russell 2000 Index gained more than 15% since the beginning of the third quarter, while the Standard and Poor’s 500 benchmark returned less than 6%. This article will lay out and discuss the hedge fund and institutional investor sentiment towards II-VI, Inc. (NASDAQ:IIVI) .
II-VI, Inc. (NASDAQ:IIVI) has seen an increase in enthusiasm from smart money recently. More specifically, during the third quarter, the number of funds from our database with long positions in the stock advanced to 20 from 18. However, the level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Tutor Perini Corp (NYSE: TPC), Summit Hotel Properties Inc (NYSE:INN), and Evolent Health Inc (NYSE:EVH) to gather more data points.
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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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What have hedge funds been doing with II-VI, Inc. (NASDAQ:IIVI)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 20 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, up by 11% from the end of the second quarter of 2016. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards IIVI over the last five quarters. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw has the number one position in II-VI, Inc. (NASDAQ:IIVI), worth close to $19.3 million, accounting for less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. On D E Shaw’s heels is Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, with a $17.6 million position; the fund has less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining members of the smart money that are bullish contain Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates, Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital, and Israel Englander’s Millennium Management. 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.
