Should You Avoid Gartner Inc (IT)?

At Insider Monkey we follow around 740 of the top investors and even though many of them underperformed the raging bull market, the history teaches us that over the long-run they still manage to beat the market after adjusting for risk, which is why it can be profitable for us to imitate their activity. Of course, even the best money managers can sometimes get it wrong, but following their best picks gives us a better chance to outperform the crowd than picking a random stock and this is where our research comes in.

In this article, we are going to take a closer look at the hedge fund sentiment towards Gartner Inc (NYSE:IT). The company registered a decline in popularity during the third quarter, as the number of funds tracked by Insider Monkey long the stock declined by two to 20. However, the level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Mid America Apartment Communities Inc (NYSE:MAA), Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. (NYSE:SNI), and Darden Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE:DRI) to gather more data points.

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.

Denys Prykhodov/Shutterstock.com

How are hedge funds trading Gartner Inc (NYSE:IT)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 20 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, down by  9% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards IT over the last five quarters. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Brian Bares’ Bares Capital Management has the largest position in Gartner Inc (NYSE:IT), worth close to $111.9 million, amounting to 6.7% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Select Equity Group, led by Robert Joseph Caruso, which holds a $65.8 million position. Some other members of the smart money that are bullish consist of Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates, Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. 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.