Hedge fund managers like David Einhorn, Dan Loeb, or Carl Icahn became billionaires through reaping large profits for their investors, which is why piggybacking their stock picks may provide us with significant returns as well. Many hedge funds, like Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, are pretty secretive, but we can still get some insights by analyzing their quarterly 13F filings. One of the most fertile grounds for large abnormal returns is hedge funds’ most popular small-cap picks, which are not so widely followed and often trade at a discount to their intrinsic value. In this article we will check out hedge fund activity in another small-cap stock: Snyder S Lance Inc (NASDAQ:LNCE).
Is Snyder S Lance Inc (NASDAQ:LNCE) the right investment to pursue these days? Hedge funds are categorically in a bearish mood. The number of bullish hedge fund positions was slashed by 2 recently. 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 Yelp Inc (NYSE:YELP), The Hanover Insurance Group, Inc. (NYSE:THG), and Catalent Inc (NYSE:CTLT) to gather more data points.
Follow Snyder's-Lance Inc. (NASDAQ:LNCE)
Follow Snyder's-Lance Inc. (NASDAQ:LNCE)
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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How are hedge funds trading Snyder S Lance Inc (NASDAQ:LNCE)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 8 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a 20% drop from the second quarter of 2016. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards LNCE over the last 5 quarters, which has declined steadily in 2016. So, let’s see 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, Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors has the most valuable position in Snyder S Lance Inc (NASDAQ:LNCE), worth close to $84.2 million. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Millennium Management, one of the 10 largest hedge funds in the world, holding a $25.3 million position. Other professional money managers with similar optimism contain Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, and Matthew Tewksbury’s Stevens 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-micro-cap stocks.
