Is Liberty Property Trust (LPT) A Good Stock To Buy?

Hedge funds and large money managers usually invest with a focus on the long-term horizon and, therefore, short-lived dips on the charts, usually don’t make them change their opinion towards a company. The second half of 2015 and the first few months of this year was a stressful period for hedge funds. However, things have been taking a turn for the better in the second half of this year. Small-cap stocks which hedge funds are usually overweight outperformed the market by double digits and it may be a good time to pay attention to hedge funds’ picks before it is too late. In this article we are going to analyze the hedge fund sentiment towards Liberty Property Trust (NYSE:LPT).

Liberty Property Trust (NYSE:LPT) was in 14 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. LPT shareholders have witnessed a decrease in support from the world’s most successful money managers lately. There were 15 hedge funds in our database with LPT holdings at the end of the previous quarter. 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 Frontier Communications Corp (NASDAQ:FTR), TreeHouse Foods Inc. (NYSE:THS), and Black Knight Financial Services Inc (NYSE:BKFS) to gather more data points.

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 does the smart money think about Liberty Property Trust (NYSE:LPT)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a 7% dip from the previous quarter, after a brief rebound in sentiment in Q2. There were a total of 16 hedge funds with a bullish position in LPT at the beginning of this year. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management has the number one position in Liberty Property Trust (NYSE:LPT), worth close to $17.3 million. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Balyasny Asset Management, led by Dmitry Balyasny, which holds a $15.6 million position. Some other peers that hold long positions encompass Eduardo Abush’s Waterfront Capital Partners, Ray Carroll’s Breton Hill Capital, and Greg Poole’s Echo Street Capital 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.