Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD): The Most Popular Energy Stock Among Top Hedge Funds

Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and famous investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds and investors’ positions as of the end of the third quarter. You can find write-ups about an individual hedge fund’s trades on several financial news websites. However, in this article we will take a look at their collective moves and analyze what the smart money thinks of Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD) based on that data.

Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD) was in 72 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. PXD has experienced a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money of late. There were 74 hedge funds in our database with PXD positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare PXD to other stocks including CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS), Ventas, Inc. (NYSE:VTR), and CRH PLC (ADR) (NYSE:CRH) 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.

Copyright: rawpixel / 123RF Stock Photo

What have hedge funds been doing with Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 72 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a 3% dip from one quarter earlier. Nonetheless, it remained the most popular energy stock among the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, SPO Advisory Corp, managed by John H. Scully, holds the largest position in Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD). SPO Advisory Corp has a $1.13 billion position in the stock, comprising 19.8% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Citadel Investment Group, managed by Ken Griffin, which holds a $367.7 million position. Remaining peers that are bullish comprise Ryan Pedlow’s Two Creeks Capital Management, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management.