You probably know from experience that there is not as much information on small-cap companies as there is on large companies. Of course, this makes it really hard and difficult for individual investors to make proper and accurate analysis of certain small-cap companies. However, well-known and successful hedge fund investors like Carl Icahn and George Soros hold the necessary resources and abilities to conduct an extensive stock analysis on small-cap stocks, which enable them to make millions of dollars by identifying potential winners within the small-cap galaxy of stocks. This represents the main reason why Insider Monkey takes notice of the hedge fund activity in these overlooked stocks.
In this article, we are going to take a closer look at Qualys Inc (NASDAQ:QLYS), which saw a slight increase in activity from smart money investors during the third quarter. Among the funds in our database, 14 funds held shares of Qualys at the end of September. At the end of this article we will also compare QLYS to other stocks including OneBeacon Insurance Group, Ltd. (NYSE:OB), Cvent Inc (NYSE:CVT), and Knight Capital Group Inc. (NYSE:KCG) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Qualys Inc. (NASDAQ:QLYS)
Follow Qualys Inc. (NASDAQ:QLYS)
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, we’re going to take a peek at the new action encompassing Qualys Inc (NASDAQ:QLYS).
How have hedgies been trading Qualys Inc (NASDAQ:QLYS)?
Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, which represents an increase by one fund from the end of June. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in QLYS over the last five quarters. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Nokota Management, led by Matthew Knauer and Mina Faltas, holds the largest position in Qualys Inc (NASDAQ:QLYS). Nokota Management has a $52.6 million position in the stock, comprising 0.9% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Anand Parekh’s Alyeska Investment Group, which reported a $41.3 million position; the fund has 0.4% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions contain Vivek Mehta and Aaron Husock’s ShearLink Capital, Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies, and Israel Englander’s Millennium 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.
