Is Loews Corporation (L) Going to Burn These Hedge Funds?

Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.

Loews Corporation (NYSE:L) shareholders have witnessed a decrease in support from the world’s most elite money managers recently. Loews was in 21 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 23 hedge funds in our database with Loews positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare Loews to other stocks including Magna International Inc. (USA) (NYSE:MGA), United Continental Holdings Inc (NYSE:UAL), and CA, Inc. (NASDAQ:CA) 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 have hedgies been trading Loews Corporation (NYSE:L)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a 9% decline from the second quarter of 2016, as hedge fund ownership begins to trend down. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Ric Dillon’s Diamond Hill Capital has the largest position in Loews Corporation (NYSE:L), worth close to $175.7 million, comprising 1.1% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Renaissance Technologies, led by Jim Simons, holding a $51.2 million position. Some other members of the smart money that are bullish contain Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management, Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital and Scott Wallace’s Wallace Capital Management.