Is Verisign, Inc. (VRSN) Going to Burn These Hedge Funds?

A whopping number of 13F filings filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been processed by Insider Monkey so that individual investors can look at the overall hedge fund sentiment towards the stocks included in their watchlists. These freshly-submitted public filings disclose money managers’ equity positions as of the end of the three-month period that ended September 30, so let’s proceed with the discussion of the hedge fund sentiment on Verisign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN).

Is Verisign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN) a good investment today? Investors who are in the know are becoming less confident. The number of long hedge fund bets were trimmed by 4 in recent months. At the end of this article we will also compare VRSN to other stocks including Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP), Ingredion Inc (NYSE:INGR), and KeyCorp (NYSE:KEY) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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 have hedgies been trading Verisign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 26 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a decrease of 13% from the second quarter of 2016, as hedge fund ownership of VRSN trends down for the second-straight quarter. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Berkshire Hathaway, managed by Warren Buffett, holds the largest position in Verisign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN). According to regulatory filings, Berkshire has a $1.01 billion position in the stock. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, with a $368.8 million position. Other professional money managers that hold long positions comprise David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, Howard Guberman’s Gruss Asset Management, and Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital.