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 Cascade Bancorp (NASDAQ:CACB) .
Cascade Bancorp (NASDAQ:CACB) shares didn’t see a lot of action during the third quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 9 hedge funds’ portfolios 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 Revance Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:RVNC), American Midstream Partners LP (NYSE:AMID), and Ring Energy Inc (NYSEMKT:REI) 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.
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With all of this in mind, let’s analyze the new action regarding Cascade Bancorp (NASDAQ:CACB).
How are hedge funds trading Cascade Bancorp (NASDAQ:CACB)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 9 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 0% from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 7 hedge funds with a bullish position in CACB at the beginning of this year. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Wilbur Ross’ Invesco Private Capital (WL Ross) has the most valuable position in Cascade Bancorp (NASDAQ:CACB), worth close to $69.6 million, accounting for 18.2% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Matthew Lindenbaum of Basswood Capital holding a $21.8 million position; the fund has 1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining professional money managers with similar optimism consist of Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies which is one of the largest hedge funds in the world, William Black’s Consector Capital and Paul Hondros’ AlphaOne Capital Partners. 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.
