Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP)’s richest investors still believe, and why not? This is a stock that’s up nearly 70% year-to-date and has show no signs of slowing down.
To many of your fellow readers, hedge funds are viewed as useless, old financial vehicles of an era lost to time. Although there are In excess of 8,000 hedge funds in operation today, this site focuses on the masters of this group, around 525 funds. It is assumed that this group has its hands on most of the smart money’s total capital, and by keeping an eye on their best equity investments, we’ve deciphered a few investment strategies that have historically beaten the S&P 500. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outstripped the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points a year for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have trumped the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (see all of our picks from August).
Equally as crucial, positive insider trading activity is another way to analyze the financial markets. As the old adage goes: there are plenty of incentives for an upper level exec to downsize shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would initiate a purchase. Several empirical studies have demonstrated the impressive potential of this strategy if shareholders understand what to do (learn more here).
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s important to examine the recent info about Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP).
How have hedgies been trading Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP)?
At Q2’s end, a total of 42 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of 2% from the previous quarter. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings considerably.
As aggregate interest spiked, certain bigger names were breaking ground themselves. Pennant Capital Management, managed by Alan Fournier, created the most outsized position in Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP). Pennant Capital Management had 208.7 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management also made a $201.8 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new TRIP positions are Paul ReederáandáEdward Shapiro’s PAR Capital Management, Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital, and Bain Capital’s Brookside Capital.
Insider trading activity in Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP)
Insider buying is most useful when the company in focus has experienced transactions within the past 180 days. Over the last 180-day time period, Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP) has experienced zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
We’ll check out the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP). These stocks are AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL), IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), Groupon Inc (NASDAQ:GRPN), Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM), and Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX). All of these stocks are in the internet information providers industry and their market caps are closest to TRIP’s market cap.
| Company Name | # of Hedge Funds | # of Insiders Buying | # of Insiders Selling |
| AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL) | 19 | 1 | 4 |
| IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) | 35 | 0 | 3 |
| Groupon Inc (NASDAQ:GRPN) | 36 | 0 | 8 |
| Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM) | 24 | 1 | 7 |
| Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX) | 19 | 0 | 0 |
Using the returns shown by the previously mentioned tactics, average investors must always keep one eye on hedge fund and insider trading activity, and Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP) applies perfectly to this mantra.
