Is NewMarket Corporation (NEU) A Good Stock To Buy?

After several tireless days we have finished crunching the numbers from the more than 700 13F filings issued by the successful hedge funds and other investment firms that we track at Insider Monkey, which disclosed those firms’ equity portfolios as of September 30. The results of that effort will be put on display in this article, as we share valuable insight into the smart money sentiment towards NewMarket Corporation (NYSE:NEU).

Is NewMarket Corporation (NYSE:NEU) a healthy stock for your portfolio? The best stock pickers are altogether taking a bullish view. The number of bullish hedge fund investments increased by 3 recently. NEU was in 14 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 11 hedge funds in our database with NEU holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare NEU to other stocks including H&R Block, Inc. (NYSE:HRB), Nutanix Inc. (NASDAQ:NTNX), and Israel Chemicals Ltd. (NYSE:ICL) to get a better sense of its popularity.

We follow over 700 hedge funds and other institutional investors and by analyzing their quarterly 13F filings, we identify stocks that they are collectively bullish on and develop investment strategies based on this data. One strategy that outperformed the market over the last year involves selecting the 100 best-performing funds and identifying the 30 mid-cap stocks that they are collectively most bullish on. Over the past year, this strategy generated returns of 18%, topping the 8% gain registered by S&P 500 ETFs. We launched this strategy 2.5 years ago and it returned more than 39% since then, vs. 22% gain registered by the S&P 500 ETFs.

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How have hedgies been trading NewMarket Corporation (NYSE:NEU)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a jump of 27% from the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in NEU over the last 5 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.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, D E Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, holds the most valuable position in NewMarket Corporation (NYSE:NEU). D E Shaw has a $44.5 million position in the stock. The second largest stake is held by Renaissance Technologies, which holds a $21.3 million position. Some other peers with similar optimism comprise Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors 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.