Is VICI Properties Inc. (VICI) A Good Stock To Buy?

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. Insider Monkey finished processing 866 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of March 31st, 2020. What do these smart investors think about VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI)?

Is VICI a good stock to buy? Money managers were turning bullish. The number of long hedge fund bets inched up by 3 in recent months. VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI) was in 41 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 59. Our calculations also showed that VICI 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.

Kevin Michael Ulrich of Anchorage Advisors

At Insider Monkey we leave no stone unturned when looking for 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, which is why we are checking out this inflation play. We go through lists like 10 best gold stocks to buy to identify promising stocks. 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 let’s take a look at the new hedge fund action encompassing VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI).

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

At Q1’s end, a total of 41 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 8% from the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in VICI over the last 23 quarters. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

The largest stake in VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI) was held by Gates Capital Management, which reported holding $120.1 million worth of stock at the end of December. It was followed by Millennium Management with a $98.4 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Soros Fund Management, D E Shaw, and Parsifal Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Hein Park Capital allocated the biggest weight to VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI), around 8.52% of its 13F portfolio. Parsifal Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 7.18 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to VICI.

As industrywide interest jumped, key hedge funds have been driving this bullishness. Long Pond Capital, managed by John Khoury, created the biggest position in VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI). Long Pond Capital had $26.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Ben Levine, Andrew Manuel and Stefan Renold’s LMR Partners also made a $14.1 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new VICI positions are David Rodriguez-Fraile’s BlueMar Capital Management, Kevin Michael Ulrich and Anthony Davis’s Anchorage Advisors, and Matthew Crandall Gilman’s Hill Winds Capital.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI). These stocks are GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS), Entegris Inc (NASDAQ:ENTG), Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN), Franklin Resources, Inc. (NYSE:BEN), Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation (NYSE:WAB), China Southern Airlines Co Ltd (NYSE:ZNH), and Solaredge Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:SEDG). This group of stocks’ market valuations resemble VICI’s market valuation.

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As you can see these stocks had an average of 28 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $978 million. That figure was $875 million in VICI’s case. GDS Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:GDS) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand China Southern Airlines Co Ltd (NYSE:ZNH) is the least popular one with only 3 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks VICI Properties Inc. (NYSE:VICI) is more popular among hedge funds. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for VICI is 78.8. 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 17.4% in 2021 through June 18th and still managed to beat the market by 6.1 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on VICI, though not to the same extent, as the stock returned 10.5% since the end of March (through June 18th) and outperformed the market as well.

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