Is The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (WTER) A Good Stock To Buy?

The 800+ hedge funds and famous money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the first quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of March 31st. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund portfolios. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER).

Is WTER a good stock to buy? The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER) was in 3 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 4. WTER investors should be aware of a decrease in hedge fund interest in recent months. There were 4 hedge funds in our database with WTER positions at the end of the fourth quarter. Our calculations also showed that WTER isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).

In the financial world there are a large number of tools investors have at their disposal to grade stocks. A pair of the most under-the-radar tools are hedge fund and insider trading indicators. We have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the best fund managers can outperform the broader indices by a solid amount. Insider Monkey’s monthly stock picks returned 206.8% since March 2017 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 115 percentage points (see the details here). That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is a useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.

Fred DiSanto of Ancora Advisors

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, an activist hedge fund wants to buy this $26 biotech stock for $50. So, we recommended a long position to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 10 best battery stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. Keeping this in mind we’re going to review the new hedge fund action regarding The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER).

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

At first quarter’s end, a total of 3 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -25% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 1 hedge funds with a bullish position in WTER a year ago. So, let’s see 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, Peconic Partners LLC, managed by William Harnisch, holds the most valuable position in The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER). Peconic Partners LLC has a $0.3 million position in the stock, comprising less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, with a $0.1 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position 0 allocated the biggest weight to The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER), around 0.03% of its 13F portfolio. 0 is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 0.001 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to WTER.

Because The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER) has witnessed falling interest from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, we can see that there were a few hedge funds that elected to cut their full holdings by the end of the first quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Renaissance Technologies cut the largest position of the “upper crust” of funds watched by Insider Monkey, totaling close to $0.2 million in stock, and Greg Eisner’s Engineers Gate Manager was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $0 million worth. These transactions are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 1 funds by the end of the first quarter.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Guaranty Federal Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:GFED), First National Corporation (NASDAQ:FXNC), Amesite Inc. (NASDAQ:AMST), Ranger Energy Services, Inc. (NYSE:RNGR), Richardson Electronics, Ltd. (NASDAQ:RELL), Lifeway Foods, Inc. (NASDAQ:LWAY), and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:MACK). This group of stocks’ market valuations are closest to WTER’s market valuation.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 3.1 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $7 million. That figure was $0 million in WTER’s case. Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:MACK) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Amesite Inc. (NASDAQ:AMST) is the least popular one with only 1 bullish hedge fund positions. The Alkaline Water Company Inc. (NASDAQ:WTER) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for WTER is 43.2. 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 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 17.2% in 2021 through June 11th and still beat the market by 3.3 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on WTER as the stock returned 33% since the end of the first quarter (through 6/11) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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