Should You Avoid W&T Offshore, Inc. (WTI)?

With the third-quarter round of 13F filings behind us it is time to take a look at the stocks in which some of the best money managers in the world preferred to invest or sell heading into the fourth quarter. One of these stocks was W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI).

Is W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI) a healthy stock for your portfolio? Prominent investors are getting less bullish. The number of long hedge fund bets were trimmed by 7 in recent months. W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI) was in 8 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2015. There were 15 hedge funds in our database with W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI) holdings at the end of the previous quarter. The stock market shares a similar sentiment towards W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI), with its stock losing 45.26% value throughout the third quarter. We will cover hedge funds that maintained positions in the company at the end of September.

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 Magnachip Semiconductor Corp (NYSE:MX), Xactly Corp (NYSE:XTLY), and Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund (ETF) (NYSEMKT:DHY) to gather more data points.

If you’d ask most investors, hedge funds are perceived as underperforming, old financial tools of years past. While there are greater than 8000 funds with their doors open today, our experts hone in on the elite of this club, approximately 700 funds. These investment experts preside over bulk of the hedge fund industry’s total asset base, and by tracking their finest picks, Insider Monkey has spotted a number of investment strategies that have historically outpaced the broader indices. Insider Monkey’s small-cap hedge fund strategy defeated the S&P 500 index by 12 percentage points a year for a decade in their back tests.

Now, we’re going to analyze the key action surrounding W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI).

What does the smart money think about W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI)?

At the end of September, a total of 8 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a decline of 47% from one quarter earlier. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Brian Riano, John Eckerson, Sean Fahey and Albert Marino’s Claren Road Asset Management has the biggest position in W&T Offshore, Inc. (NYSE:WTI), worth close to $10.6 million, accounting for 18.4% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Bruce J. Richards and Louis Hanover of Marathon Asset Management, with an $3.4 million position; the fund has 1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other peers that hold long positions comprise Clint Carlson’s Carlson Capital, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, and David Costen Haley’s HBK Investments.