Is PXD Stock A Buy or Sell?

The financial regulations require hedge funds and wealthy investors that exceeded the $100 million holdings threshold to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings to a certain extent level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings disclosed the funds’ positions on December 31st. We at Insider Monkey have made an extensive database of more than 887 of those established hedge funds and famous value investors’ filings. In this article, we analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD) based on those filings.

Is PXD stock a buy or sell? Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD) investors should be aware of a decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds in recent months. Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD) was in 40 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. The all time high for this statistic is 74. There were 42 hedge funds in our database with PXD positions at the end of the third quarter. Our calculations also showed that PXD isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q4 rankings).

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William Harnisch of Peconic Partners LLC

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Do Hedge Funds Think PXD Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At Q4’s end, a total of 40 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -5% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards PXD over the last 22 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.

The largest stake in Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD) was held by Adage Capital Management, which reported holding $131.1 million worth of stock at the end of December. It was followed by Two Sigma Advisors with a $107.5 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Millennium Management, Point State Capital, and Citadel Investment Group. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Point State Capital allocated the biggest weight to Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD), around 1.85% of its 13F portfolio. Encompass Capital Advisors is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 1.69 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to PXD.

Due to the fact that Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD) has faced a decline in interest from the aggregate hedge fund industry, logic holds that there was a specific group of money managers who were dropping their full holdings in the fourth quarter. Intriguingly, Brandon Haley’s Holocene Advisors said goodbye to the biggest stake of the “upper crust” of funds monitored by Insider Monkey, valued at about $27.1 million in stock, and Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $18.9 million worth. These bearish behaviors are intriguing to say the least, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds in the fourth quarter.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD) but similarly valued. These stocks are Hologic, Inc. (NASDAQ:HOLX), PagSeguro Digital Ltd. (NYSE:PAGS), Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ:CHKP), SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:SSNC), Restaurant Brands International Inc (NYSE:QSR), Smith & Nephew plc (NYSE:SNN), and Amcor plc (NYSE:AMCR). This group of stocks’ market valuations are similar to PXD’s market valuation.

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As you can see these stocks had an average of 30.4 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1241 million. That figure was $686 million in PXD’s case. SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:SSNC) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Smith & Nephew plc (NYSE:SNN) is the least popular one with only 12 bullish hedge fund positions. Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE:PXD) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for PXD is 57.1. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. Our calculations showed that top 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 81.2% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 26 percentage points. These stocks gained 5.3% in 2021 through March 19th and still beat the market by 0.8 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on PXD as the stock returned 43.5% since the end of Q4 (through 3/19) and outperformed the market. Hedge funds were rewarded for their relative bullishness.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.