Should You Buy MB Financial, Inc. (MBFI)?

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MB Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:MBFI) shares didn’t see a lot of action during the third quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 11 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. At the end of this article we will also compare MBFI to other stocks including Aspen Insurance Holdings Limited (NYSE:AHL), Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical Inc (NASDAQ:RARE), and Urban Edge Properties (NYSE:UE) 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.

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With all of this in mind, let’s take a gander at the key action encompassing MB Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:MBFI).

How have hedgies been trading MB Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:MBFI)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 11 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 0% from the second quarter of 2016. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards MBFI over the last 5 quarters. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Cardinal Capital, led by Amy Minella, holds the biggest position in MB Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:MBFI). Cardinal Capital has a $68.5 million position in the stock, comprising 3.2% of its 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Balyasny Asset Management, led by Dmitry Balyasny, which holds a $9.1 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other professional money managers with similar optimism include Matthew Lindenbaum’s Basswood Capital, John W. Rogers’s Ariel Investments and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. We should note that none of these elite funds are among our list of the 100 best performing elite funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.