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 Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. (NYSE:TR).
Hedge fund interest in Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. (NYSE:TR) shares was flat at the end of last quarter, with 13 hedge funds in our database with TR holdings This is usually a negative indicator. At the end of this article we will also compare TR to other stocks including Knight Transportation (NYSE:KNX), WP Glimcher Inc (NYSE:WPG), and Armstrong World Industries, Inc. (NYSE:AWI) to get a better sense of its popularity.
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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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Hedge fund activity in Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. (NYSE:TR)
Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 13 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, unchanged from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 11 hedge funds with a bullish position in TR at the beginning of this year. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, GAMCO Investors, led by Mario Gabelli, holds the largest position in Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. (NYSE:TR). GAMCO Investors has a $46.3 million position in the stock. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Royce & Associates, led by Chuck Royce, holding a $28 million position. Remaining members of the smart money that are bullish include John D. Gillespie’s Prospector Partners, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital. 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.
