The worries about the election and the ongoing uncertainty about the path of interest-rate increases have been keeping investors on the sidelines. Of course, most hedge funds and other asset managers have been underperforming main stock market indices since the middle of 2015. Interestingly though, smaller-cap stocks registered their best performance relative to the large-capitalization stocks since the end of the June quarter, suggesting that this may be the best time to take a cue from their stock picks. In fact, the Russell 2000 Index gained more than 15% since the beginning of the third quarter, while the Standard and Poor’s 500 benchmark returned less than 6%. This article will lay out and discuss the hedge fund and institutional investor sentiment towards Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:BBRG).
Is Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:BBRG) the right investment to pursue these days? Hedge funds are surely in a pessimistic mood. The number of bullish hedge fund positions decreased by 3 lately. In this way, there were 8 hedge funds in our database with BBRG holdings at the end of the last quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare BBRG to other stocks including Key Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KTEC), UCP Inc (NYSE:UCP), and Sophiris Bio Inc (NASDAQ:SPHS) 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.
Nitr/Shutterstock.com
How are hedge funds trading Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:BBRG)?
Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 8 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, down by 27% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 12 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in BBRG heading into this year. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, D E Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, holds the number one position in Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:BBRG). D E Shaw has a $1 million position in the stock. Coming in second is Peter Algert and Kevin Coldiron’s Algert Coldiron Investors which holds a $0.5 million position. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions include John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, Jeffrey Bronchick’s Cove Street Capital and Israel Englander’s Millennium Management. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.
