Box Inc (NYSE:BOX) launched its IPO towards the end of January and got its first major investor in the form of Phillippe Laffont‘s Coatue Management shortly afterwards. Coatue Management built a 9.99% stake in the cloud service provider by buying 1.25 million shares of the company’s initial offering of 12.5 million shares. The stock was initially offered at $14 per share and jumped a whopping 61% to $22.55 on its first trading day. It has been a steady decline since then, as the stock has dropped around 28% so far, though it is still trading at around $16.50, higher that its IPO price. By the end of the first quarter, there were eight hedge funds holding long positions in the stock, with a total investment of $50.7 million. Coatue Management held the largest position in the stock of those, valued at $24.5 million by the end of March, followed by Bain Capital’s Brookside Capital with around 702,000 shares worth $13.9 million by the end of first trimester. Other major investors in the stock include John Burbank‘s Passport Capital, Ken Griffin‘s Citadel Investment Group, and Kenney Y. Oh’s Seastone Capital Management. Hedge funds weren’t overly bullish on this stock, and the fact that the stock has dropped consistently since its first trading day seems to reinforce their sentiment, though Pacific Crest now disagrees.
QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) reported its financial results for its fiscal third quarter on Wednesday, which managed to beat the Street’s expectations on profits, though they narrowly missed the revenue expectations. QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) posted earnings of $0.99 per share, beating the consensus estimate by $0.04, and revenue of $5.83 billion, missing the expectations by $20 million. The shares dropped by around 2.5% following its earnings report, but the chipmaker made some key announcements like cutting its workforce by 15% and some changes to its board and executive compensation that have since pleased investors. QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) is expected to reduce its workforce costs by some $1.4 billion through its latest measures. Activist investor Barry Rosenstein of JANA Partners was the largest investor in QUALCOMM within our database as of March 31, with around 28.5 million shares valued at $1.98 billion by the end of March. Rosenstein has been pushing the company to break up into two separate firms and the company announced on Wednesday that it would review just such a strategy to split the company in twain. Despite the revenue miss by the company, the announcement of its cost cuts and strategic review of a possible split worked in favor of the stock, as Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock in its latest report. Hedge fund interest in the stock increased during the first quarter, as the total investment by hedge funds increased by more than 50% to $6.8 billion by the end of March. Some key investors in QUALCOMM include hedge fund managers like Ken Fisher of Fisher Asset Management, Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, and Israel Englander of Millennium Management. Overall, the hedge funds remained bullish on the stock through the first quarter and the influence of activist investor Rosenstein has made the company make strong moves to improve its performance.
On the other hand, Cowen felt that the outlook for GrubHub Inc (NYSE:GRUB) is not that great for the rest of the year when it decided to downgrade the stock. This move from Cohen has hit the stock hard today. But hedge funds did not reflect this sentiment on the stock during the first three months of the year, as they increased their investments by more than 70% during that time. Considering the fact that the stock had gained around 25% during the January – March period, we can say that the hedge funds were rather bullish on the stock. This shows a clear conflict between hedge funds and analysts’ view on the stock. Christian Leone of Luxor Capital Group held the largest position in the stock among the investors we track by the end of March, as he had around 3.5 million shares valued at $160.3 million. Other leading hedge fund managers like Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group and John Thaler of JAT Capital Management also held a significant position in the stock.
Disclosure: None
