Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and successful value investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds’ and successful investors’ positions as of the end of the fourth quarter. You can find articles about an individual hedge fund’s trades on numerous financial news websites. However, in this article we will take a look at their collective moves over the last 5 years and analyze what the smart money thinks of Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA) based on that data.
Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA) has seen an increase in support from the world’s most elite money managers of late. Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA) was in 43 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. The all time high for this statistic was previously 34. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. There were 34 hedge funds in our database with KURA positions at the end of the third quarter. Our calculations also showed that KURA isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q4 rankings).
To the average investor there are plenty of gauges investors put to use to grade their stock investments. A couple of the best gauges are hedge fund and insider trading activity. Our experts have shown that, historically, those who follow the best picks of the elite hedge fund managers can outpace the market by a healthy margin (see the details here). Also, our monthly newsletter’s portfolio of long stock picks returned 197% since March 2017 (through March 2021) and beat the S&P 500 Index by 124 percentage points. You can download a sample issue of this newsletter on our website .
Oleg Nodelman of EcoR1 Capital
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Do Hedge Funds Think KURA Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
Heading into the first quarter of 2021, a total of 43 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 26% from the third quarter of 2020. On the other hand, there were a total of 22 hedge funds with a bullish position in KURA a year ago. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Behzad Aghazadeh’s Avoro Capital Advisors (venBio Select Advisor) has the biggest position in Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA), worth close to $130.6 million, corresponding to 2.2% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, with a $100.2 million position; less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism encompass Oleg Nodelman’s EcoR1 Capital, Brandon Haley’s Holocene Advisors and Mark Lampert’s Biotechnology Value Fund / BVF Inc. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Acuta Capital Partners allocated the biggest weight to Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA), around 5.67% of its 13F portfolio. EcoR1 Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 3.11 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to KURA.
With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, key money managers have been driving this bullishness. Hillhouse Capital Management, managed by Lei Zhang, assembled the biggest position in Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA). Hillhouse Capital Management had $21.2 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Kris Jenner, Gordon Bussard, Graham McPhail’s Rock Springs Capital Management also made a $16.6 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new KURA positions are Richard Driehaus’s Driehaus Capital, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and Ting Jia’s Octagon Capital Advisors.
Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA) but similarly valued. These stocks are Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (NASDAQ:SHEN), TC Pipelines, LP (NYSE:TCP), Pretium Resources Inc (NYSE:PVG), Flagstar Bancorp Inc (NYSE:FBC), Silk Road Medical, Inc. (NASDAQ:SILK), Main Street Capital Corporation (NYSE:MAIN), and Gentherm Inc (NASDAQ:THRM). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to KURA’s market cap.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| SHEN | 5 | 74165 | -4 |
| TCP | 2 | 984 | -1 |
| PVG | 22 | 162262 | 2 |
| FBC | 28 | 280734 | 3 |
| SILK | 27 | 183660 | 7 |
| MAIN | 7 | 42787 | 3 |
| THRM | 13 | 111371 | 3 |
| Average | 14.9 | 122280 | 1.9 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 14.9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $122 million. That figure was $619 million in KURA’s case. Flagstar Bancorp Inc (NYSE:FBC) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand TC Pipelines, LP (NYSE:TCP) is the least popular one with only 2 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ:KURA) is more popular among hedge funds. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for KURA is 90. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. Our calculations showed that top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 90.7% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 35 percentage points. These stocks gained 13.6% in 2021 through April 30th and still beat the market by 1.6 percentage points. Unfortunately KURA wasn’t nearly as popular as these 10 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on KURA were disappointed as the stock returned -17.5% since the end of the fourth quarter (through 4/30) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
