We at Insider Monkey have gone over 866 13F filings that hedge funds and prominent investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of March 31st. In this article, we look at what those funds think of Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD) based on that data.
Is YRD a good stock to buy? The smart money was buying. The number of long hedge fund positions rose by 2 lately. Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD) was in 4 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 12. Our calculations also showed that YRD isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).
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Matthew Hulsizer of PEAK6 Capital
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Do Hedge Funds Think YRD Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
At first quarter’s end, a total of 4 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 100% from the fourth quarter of 2020. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in YRD over the last 23 quarters. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Renaissance Technologies has the number one position in Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD), worth close to $2.8 million, comprising less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. On Renaissance Technologies’s heels is Warren Lammert of Granite Point Capital, with a $0.8 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other professional money managers that are bullish contain Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position 0 allocated the biggest weight to Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD), around 0.03% of its 13F portfolio. 0 is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 0.0035 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to YRD.
As aggregate interest increased, some big names have jumped into Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD) headfirst. Granite Point Capital, managed by Warren Lammert, established the biggest position in Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD). Granite Point Capital had $0.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group also initiated a $0.3 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new YRD positions are Matthew Hulsizer’s PEAK6 Capital Management, D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.
Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD). These stocks are TrueCar Inc (NASDAQ:TRUE), Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S.A. (NYSE:BLX), Lawson Products, Inc. (NASDAQ:LAWS), Cross Country Healthcare, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCRN), Noodles & Co (NASDAQ:NDLS), Teekay Tankers Ltd. (NYSE:TNK), and Viking Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:VKTX). This group of stocks’ market values are similar to YRD’s market value.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| TRUE | 16 | 82996 | -2 |
| BLX | 1 | 6368 | 0 |
| LAWS | 5 | 30507 | 0 |
| CCRN | 13 | 43618 | -2 |
| NDLS | 18 | 155331 | -4 |
| TNK | 9 | 13611 | 0 |
| VKTX | 13 | 33211 | 0 |
| Average | 10.7 | 52235 | -1.1 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 10.7 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $52 million. That figure was $4 million in YRD’s case. Noodles & Co (NASDAQ:NDLS) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S.A. (NYSE:BLX) is the least popular one with only 1 bullish hedge fund positions. Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for YRD is 25.8. 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. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. 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 17.2% in 2021 through June 11th and surpassed the market again by 3.3 percentage points. Unfortunately YRD wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); YRD investors were disappointed as the stock returned -4.7% since the end of March (through 6/11) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2021.
Follow Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD)
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
