McCormick & Company, Incorporated (MKC): Are Hedge Funds Right About This Stock?

The SEC requires hedge funds and wealthy investors with over a certain portfolio size to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings discloses the funds’ positions on September 30. We at Insider Monkey have compiled an extensive database of more than 700 of those elite funds and prominent investors’ filings. In this article, we analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded McCormick & Company, Incorporated (NYSE:MKC) based on those filings.

Is McCormick & Company, Incorporated (NYSE:MKC) a good investment right now? Prominent investors are buying. The number of bullish hedge fund bets went up by 3 lately. At the end of this article we will also compare MKC to other stocks including Spectra Energy Partners, LP (NYSE:SEP), Franco-Nevada Corporation (NYSE:FNV), and Fifth Third Bancorp (NASDAQ:FITB) 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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What does the smart money think about McCormick & Company, Incorporated (NYSE:MKC)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a 17% leap from the previous quarter. There are now nearly 50% more shareholders of MKC among top funds than there were three quarters earlier. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management has the biggest position in McCormick & Company, Incorporated (NYSE:MKC), worth close to $47.6 million. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies, with a $19.3 million position. Other members of the smart money that are bullish comprise David Harding’s Winton Capital Management, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and Israel Englander’s Millennium Management.