IT giant NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) doesn’t really get the respect it deserves, at least from the general public. Here’s a stock that’s up over 24% year-to-date, and with a market cap near $15B, it’s not exactly small either. While most financial journalists focus their analyses on the HP’s and Oracle’s of this space, NetApp keeps chugging along. Hedge funds sure love this stock, and it may be this group of investors that have driven most of the stock’s gains this year.
In the financial world, there are plenty of indicators shareholders can use to watch their holdings. Some of the most under-the-radar are hedge fund and insider trading sentiment. At Insider Monkey, our studies have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the top money managers can outpace the market by a superb amount (see just how much).
Just as key, positive insider trading sentiment is a second way to look at the investments you’re interested in. Just as you’d expect, there are plenty of reasons for an upper level exec to sell shares of his or her company, but only one, very simple reason why they would buy. Various empirical studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this method if shareholders understand where to look (learn more here).
Keeping this in mind, we’re going to study the latest info about NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP).
What have hedge funds been doing with NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP)?
At Q2’s end, a total of 50 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of 19% from the previous quarter. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully.
Out of the hedge funds we follow, Elliott Management, managed by Paul Singer, holds the most valuable position in NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP). Elliott Management has a $578 million position in the stock, comprising 11.1% of its 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital, with a $212.9 million position; 2.9% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Some other hedgies that hold long positions include George Soros’s Soros Fund Management, Matt Sirovich and Jeremy Mindich’s Scopia Capital and Larry Robbins’s Glenview Capital.
As industrywide interest increased, certain money managers were breaking ground themselves. Elliott Management, managed by Paul Singer, assembled the most outsized position in NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP). Elliott Management had 578 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Lee Ainslie’s Maverick Capital also made a $212.9 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new NTAP investors: George Soros’s Soros Fund Management, Matt Sirovich and Jeremy Mindich’s Scopia Capital, and Larry Robbins’s Glenview Capital.
What have insiders been doing with NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP)?
Legal insider trading, particularly when it’s bullish, is most useful when the primary stock in question has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the latest six-month time frame, NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) has seen zero unique insiders purchasing, and 6 insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
We’ll go over the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP). These stocks are Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:BRCD), EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK), Seagate Technology PLC (NASDAQ:STX), and Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ:WDC). This group of stocks belong to the data storage devices industry and their market caps are similar to NTAP’s market cap.
