Billionaire hedge fund managers such as Steve Cohen and Stan Druckenmiller can generate millions or even billions of dollars every year by pinning down high-potential small-cap stocks and pouring cash into these candidates. Small-cap stocks are overlooked by most investors, brokerage houses, and financial services hubs, while the unlimited research abilities of the big players within the hedge fund industry can easily identify the undervalued and high-potential stocks that reside the ignored corners of equity markets. There are numerous small-cap stocks that have turned out to be great winners, which is one of the main reasons the Insider Monkey team pays close attention to the hedge fund activity in relation to these stocks.
Is Pool Corporation (NASDAQ:POOL) a safe investment now? Prominent investors are actually taking an optimistic view. The number of long hedge fund positions inched up by 3 lately. 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 Cullen/Frost Bankers, Inc. (NYSE:CFR), Navient Corp (NASDAQ:NAVI), and Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:NBIX) to gather more data points.
Follow Pool Corp (NASDAQ:POOL)
Follow Pool Corp (NASDAQ:POOL)
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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With all of this in mind, let’s take a peek at the key action encompassing Pool Corporation (NASDAQ:POOL).
How are hedge funds trading Pool Corporation (NASDAQ:POOL)?
At Q3’s end, a total of 26 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 13% from the second quarter of 2016. This is also the highest level achieved by the company over the last 5 quarters.
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management has the largest position in Pool Corporation (NASDAQ:POOL), worth close to $61.7 million, corresponding to 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Chuck Royce of Royce & Associates, with a $33.7 million position; the fund has 0.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other peers that hold long positions comprise Ben Gambill’s Tiger Eye Capital, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and Ian Simm’s Impax Asset Management. We should note that Impax Asset Management is one of the 100 best performing hedge funds in our database.
