Is TRMK A Good Stock To Buy Now?

Our extensive research has shown that imitating the smart money can generate significant returns for retail investors, which is why we track nearly 817 active prominent money managers and analyze their quarterly 13F filings. The stocks that are heavily bought by hedge funds historically outperformed the market, though there is no shortage of high profile failures like hedge funds’ 2018 losses in Facebook and Apple. Let’s take a closer look at what the funds we track think about Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK) in this article.

Is TRMK a good stock to buy now? Money managers were getting more optimistic. The number of bullish hedge fund positions went up by 1 recently. Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK) was in 18 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2020. The all time high for this statistic is 17. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. Our calculations also showed that TRMK isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks). There were 17 hedge funds in our database with TRMK positions at the end of the second quarter.

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

To the average investor there are a large number of tools stock market investors put to use to assess their holdings. A duo of the best tools are hedge fund and insider trading moves. Our researchers have shown that, historically, those who follow the best picks of the top investment managers can trounce the broader indices by a solid amount (see the details here).

At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 15 best blue chip stocks to pick the best large-cap stocks to buy. 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 website. Keeping this in mind let’s analyze the key hedge fund action regarding Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK).

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

At Q3’s end, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 6% from one quarter earlier. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in TRMK over the last 21 quarters. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

Among these funds, Renaissance Technologies held the most valuable stake in Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK), which was worth $5.6 million at the end of the third quarter. On the second spot was Citadel Investment Group which amassed $5 million worth of shares. Millennium Management, AQR Capital Management, and Arrowstreet Capital were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position AlphaCrest Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK), around 0.04% of its 13F portfolio. Winton Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.01 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to TRMK.

As one would reasonably expect, some big names have jumped into Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK) headfirst. Arrowstreet Capital, managed by Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell, created the biggest position in Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK). Arrowstreet Capital had $4.3 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Mika Toikka’s AlphaCrest Capital Management also made a $0.3 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new TRMK investors: Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp and Gavin Saitowitz and Cisco J. del Valle’s Prelude Capital (previously Springbok Capital).

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK). These stocks are Resideo Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:REZI), Monmouth Real Estate Investment Corp. (NYSE:MNR), Sleep Number Corporation (NASDAQ:SNBR), CSG Systems International, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSGS), Monro Inc (NASDAQ:MNRO), Marten Transport, Ltd (NASDAQ:MRTN), and Patrick Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:PATK). All of these stocks’ market caps resemble TRMK’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 18.9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $122 million. That figure was $30 million in TRMK’s case. Resideo Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:REZI) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Monro Inc (NASDAQ:MNRO) is the least popular one with only 14 bullish hedge fund positions. Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for TRMK is 58.2. 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 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.3% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10 percentage points. These stocks gained 30.7% in 2020 through December 14th and still beat the market by 15.8 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on TRMK as the stock returned 26.6% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/14) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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