Is TTGT A Good Stock To Buy Now?

In this article we will take a look at whether hedge funds think TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT) is a good investment right now. We check hedge fund and billionaire investor sentiment before delving into hours of research. Hedge funds spend millions of dollars on Ivy League graduates, unconventional data sources, expert networks, and get tips from investment bankers and industry insiders. Sure they sometimes fail miserably, but their consensus stock picks historically outperformed the market after adjusting for known risk factors.

Is TTGT a good stock to buy now? The best stock pickers were in a bullish mood. The number of long hedge fund bets advanced by 2 lately. TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT) was in 14 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. The all time high for this statistic is 17. Our calculations also showed that TTGT 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).

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

If you’d ask most shareholders, hedge funds are assumed to be slow, outdated investment vehicles of the past. While there are over 8000 funds in operation at the moment, Our experts look at the masters of this club, approximately 850 funds. These investment experts preside over bulk of all hedge funds’ total capital, and by watching their first-class equity investments, Insider Monkey has deciphered various investment strategies that have historically surpassed Mr. Market. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy surpassed the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points annually since its inception in March 2017. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 13% since February 2017 (through November 17th) even though the market was up 65% during the same period. We just shared a list of 6 short targets in our latest quarterly update .

Bruce Kovner of Caxton Associates LP

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 we’re going to analyze the key hedge fund action regarding TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT).

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

At third quarter’s end, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 17% from the second quarter of 2020. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards TTGT over the last 21 quarters. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Among these funds, Renaissance Technologies held the most valuable stake in TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT), which was worth $56.6 million at the end of the third quarter. On the second spot was Arrowstreet Capital which amassed $8.3 million worth of shares. GLG Partners, Winton Capital Management, and Two Sigma Advisors 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 Winton Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT), around 0.11% of its 13F portfolio. Navellier & Associates is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.08 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to TTGT.

Consequently, key hedge funds were leading the bulls’ herd. GLG Partners, managed by Noam Gottesman, assembled the largest position in TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT). GLG Partners had $4.7 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Paul Marshall and Ian Wace’s Marshall Wace LLP also made a $1.4 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Bruce Kovner’s Caxton Associates LP, Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp, and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT) but similarly valued. These stocks are Encore Capital Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ECPG), BrightView Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BV), Argo Group International Holdings, Ltd. (NYSE:ARGO), Viper Energy Partners LP (NASDAQ:VNOM), TowneBank (NASDAQ:TOWN), INMODE LTD. (NASDAQ:INMD), and Inter Parfums, Inc. (NASDAQ:IPAR). All of these stocks’ market caps match TTGT’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 15.4 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $95 million. That figure was $81 million in TTGT’s case. Encore Capital Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ECPG) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Viper Energy Partners LP (NASDAQ:VNOM) is the least popular one with only 11 bullish hedge fund positions. TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for TTGT is 48.4. 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 32.9% in 2020 through December 8th and still beat the market by 16.2 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on TTGT as the stock returned 20% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/8) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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