These Four Stocks Are in Spotlight on Friday and Here’s Why

The Dow Jones Industrial Average remains close an hour before the closing bell, while the S&P 500 is heading towards ending the day in the red. A mixed sentiment was experienced among Weight Watchers International, Inc. (NYSE:WTW), Ubiquiti Networks Inc (NASDAQ:UBNT), TrueCar Inc (NASDAQ:TRUE) and Mad Catz Interactive, Inc. (USA) (NYSEMKT:MCZ) which played on opposing ends of the performance spectrum. Let’s see why these stocks are in the spotlight today. In addition, we will take a look at the hedge fund sentiment towards these stocks.

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At Insider Monkey, we track hedge funds’ moves in order to identify actionable patterns and profit from them. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ large-cap stock picks historically underperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of seven basis points per month between 1999 and 2012. On the other hand, the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds outperformed the S&P 500 Index by an average of 53 basis points per month (read the details here). Since the official launch of our small-cap strategy in August 2012, it has performed just as predicted, returning over 102% and beating the market by more than 53 percentage points. We believe the data is clear: investors will be better off by focusing on small-cap stocks utilizing hedge fund expertise (while avoiding their high fees at the same time) rather than large-cap stocks.

Investors have flocked Weight Watchers International, Inc. (NYSE:WTW), whose stock has surged by more than 33% with more than 11 million shares traded. Weight Watchers International, Inc. (NYSE:WTW) has released its third-quarter 2015 financial report and raised its full-year earnings guidance to between $0.64 and $0.74 per share on an adjusted basis. It reported $21.8 million, or $0.38, in net income for the most recent quarter that ended October 3, which is 42.5% lower than the $37.9 million or $0.67 per share from the prior-year period. Its revenues also declined to $273.3 million in the third quarter, compared to $345.2 million from the same period last year. Meanwhile, adjusted operating income declined to $64.2 million in the third quarter of 2015 – reflecting a 30.3% slide from the $92.1 million in the third quarter of 2014.

Most recently, celebrity Oprah Winfrey joined the company’s board of directors and made a $43.2 million equity investment in the company. By the end of the second quarter of 2015, nine funds out of 730 from our database held shares of the company.