At Insider Monkey, we pore over the filings of nearly 866 top investment firms every quarter, a process we have now completed for the latest reporting period. The data we’ve gathered as a result gives us access to a wealth of collective knowledge based on these firms’ portfolio holdings as of March 31st. In this article, we will use that wealth of knowledge to determine whether or not LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII) makes for a good investment right now.
Is LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII) a buy, sell, or hold? The best stock pickers were in a bullish mood. The number of long hedge fund positions increased by 2 lately. LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII) was in 18 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 25. Our calculations also showed that LCII isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).
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Chuck Royce of Royce & Associates
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Do Hedge Funds Think LCII Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
Heading into the second quarter of 2021, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 13% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards LCII over the last 23 quarters. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
The largest stake in LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII) was held by Royce & Associates, which reported holding $75.3 million worth of stock at the end of December. It was followed by Millennium Management with a $20.6 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Park Presidio Capital, Motley Fool Asset Management, and Intrinsic Edge Capital. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Zebra Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII), around 1.62% of its 13F portfolio. Park Presidio Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 1.26 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to LCII.
Consequently, specific money managers have been driving this bullishness. Tontine Asset Management, managed by Jeffrey Gendell, initiated the biggest position in LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII). Tontine Asset Management had $6.6 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint Capital also made a $1.7 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new LCII investors: Roger Ibbotson’s Zebra Capital Management, Greg Eisner’s Engineers Gate Manager, and Donald Sussman’s Paloma Partners.
Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII) but similarly valued. These stocks are ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFBS), Pluralsight, Inc. (NASDAQ:PS), Avista Corp (NYSE:AVA), DouYu International Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:DOYU), Dorman Products Inc. (NASDAQ:DORM), Sensient Technologies Corporation (NYSE:SXT), and NorthWestern Corporation (NYSE:NWE). This group of stocks’ market caps resemble LCII’s market cap.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| SFBS | 9 | 9892 | 0 |
| PS | 34 | 858839 | -1 |
| AVA | 15 | 56958 | 5 |
| DOYU | 29 | 327651 | 2 |
| DORM | 21 | 98065 | 0 |
| SXT | 16 | 203825 | -1 |
| NWE | 11 | 62833 | -4 |
| Average | 19.3 | 231152 | 0.1 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 19.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $231 million. That figure was $159 million in LCII’s case. Pluralsight, Inc. (NASDAQ:PS) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFBS) is the least popular one with only 9 bullish hedge fund positions. LCI Industries (NYSE:LCII) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for LCII is 46.6. 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 28.5% in 2021 through July 23rd and surpassed the market again by 10.1 percentage points. Unfortunately LCII wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); LCII investors were disappointed as the stock returned 8.6% since the end of March (through 7/23) 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.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
