Earlier this year, many hedge funds were holding a larger percentage of their assets in cash than at any other time in recent memory, as fears that the market was due for a correction abounded. This led to many small-cap stocks being hit hard, as hedge funds, which tend to be some of their staunchest backers, liquidated their holdings. Now however, hedge funds appear to be growing more confident and putting their money back into equities, which has led to small-cap stocks taking off, with the Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) having outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by more than 10 percentage points since the end of June. In this article, we’ll see how this large shift in hedge fund activity impacted Mid-America Apartment Communities Inc (NYSE:MAA) .
Mid-America Apartment Communities Inc (NYSE:MAA) investors should pay attention to a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money lately. MAA was in 15 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 17 hedge funds in our database with MAA 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 Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. (NYSE:SNI), Darden Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE:DRI), and Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ:GRMN) to gather more data points.
Follow Mid America Apartment Communities Inc. (NYSE:MAA)
Follow Mid America Apartment Communities Inc. (NYSE:MAA)
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 Mid America Apartment Communities Inc (NYSE:MAA)
Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 15 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a fall of 12% from one quarter earlier. By comparison, 17 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in MAA heading into this year. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies has the largest position in Mid-America Apartment Communities Inc (NYSE:MAA), worth close to $58.1 million. On Renaissance Technologies’s heels is Fisher Asset Management, led by Ken Fisher, holding a $54.4 million position. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism include Ric Dillon’s Diamond Hill Capital, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and Ray Carroll’s Breton Hill Capital. 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.
