There are several ways to beat the market, and investing in small cap stocks has historically been one of them. We like to improve the odds of beating the market further by examining what famous hedge fund operators such as Carl Icahn and George Soros think. Those hedge fund operators make billions of dollars each year by hiring the best and the brightest to do research on stocks, including small cap stocks that big brokerage houses simply don’t cover. Because of Carl Icahn and other successful funds’ exemplary historical records, we pay attention to their small cap picks. In this article, we will use data from the last round of 13F filings to analyze Navigant Consulting, Inc. (NYSE:NCI).
Navigant Consulting, Inc. (NYSE:NCI) investors should be aware of a decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds last quarter. There were 13 hedge funds in our database with NCI positions at the end of September. At the end of this article we will also compare NCI to other stocks including Cray Inc. (NASDAQ:CRAY), Bottomline Technologies (NASDAQ:EPAY), and Hertz Global Holdings Inc (NYSE:HRI) 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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Now, let’s go over the recent action surrounding Navigant Consulting, Inc. (NYSE:NCI).
What have hedge funds been doing with Navigant Consulting, Inc. (NYSE:NCI)?
At Q3’s end, a total of 13 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, down by two funds from the end of June. By comparison, 15 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in NCI heading into this year. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, D E Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, holds the most valuable position in Navigant Consulting, Inc. (NYSE:NCI). D E Shaw has a $12 million position in the stock, comprising less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies which holds a $8.8 million position. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism encompass Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and Cliff Asness’ AQR 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.
