Does Unum Group (NYSE:UNM) represent a good buying opportunity at the moment? Let’s briefly check the hedge fund sentiment towards the company. Hedge fund firms constantly search out bright intellectuals and highly-experienced employees and throw away millions of dollars on research activities, so it is no wonder why they tend to generate millions in profits each year. It is also true that some hedge fund players fail unconceivably on some occasions, but their stock picks have been generating superior risk-adjusted returns on average over the years.
Is Unum Group (NYSE:UNM) worth your attention right now? Prominent investors are getting less bullish. The number of bullish hedge fund positions fell by 6 lately. UNMwas in 16 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 22 hedge funds in our database with UNM positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare UNM to other stocks including YPF SA (ADR) (NYSE:YPF), Lear Corporation (NYSE:LEA), and Teck Resources Ltd (USA) (NYSE:TCK) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Unum Group (NYSE:UNM)
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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 look at the new action encompassing Unum Group (NYSE:UNM).
What have hedge funds been doing with Unum Group (NYSE:UNM)?
Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 16 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -27% from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 23 hedge funds with a bullish position in UNM at the beginning of this year. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management has the number one position in Unum Group (NYSE:UNM), worth close to $110.9 million, corresponding to 0.2% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Winton Capital Management, led by David Harding, which holds a $21.3 million position; the fund has 0.4% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other members of the smart money with similar optimism contain Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital, Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management and Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset 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.
