Legendary investors such as Leon Cooperman and Seth Klarman earn enormous amounts of money for themselves and their investors by doing in-depth research on small-cap stocks that big brokerage houses don’t publish. Small cap stocks -especially when they are screened well- can generate substantial outperformance versus a boring index fund. That’s why we analyze the activity of those successful funds in these small-cap stocks. In the following paragraphs, we analyze Worthington Industries, Inc. (NYSE:WOR) from the perspective of those successful funds.
Is Worthington Industries, Inc. (NYSE:WOR) a first-rate investment right now? Investors who are in the know are reducing their bets on the stock. The number of bullish hedge fund bets that are revealed through the 13F filings fell by 2 in recent months. WOR was in 16 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 18 hedge funds in our database with WOR positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare WOR to other stocks including Horizon Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:HZNP), Kate Spade & Co (NYSE:KATE), and Logitech International SA (USA) (NASDAQ:LOGI) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Worthington Enterprises Inc. (NYSE:WOR)
Follow Worthington Enterprises Inc. (NYSE:WOR)
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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How have hedgies been trading Worthington Industries, Inc. (NYSE:WOR)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 16 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, an 11% decline from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards WOR over the last 5 quarters, which shows that ownership of the stock is still up over the last year. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of notable hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, AQR Capital Management, led by Cliff Asness, holds the number one position in Worthington Industries, Inc. (NYSE:WOR). AQR Capital Management has a $59.2 million position in the stock. The second most bullish fund manager is Royce & Associates, led by Chuck Royce, holding a $46.9 million position. Remaining professional money managers that hold long positions contain Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital, David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, and Robert B. Gillam’s McKinley Capital Management. 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.
Since Worthington Industries, Inc. (NYSE:WOR) has gone through bearish sentiment from hedge fund managers, it’s easy to see that there lies a certain “tier” of funds who sold off their full holdings by the end of the third quarter. Intriguingly, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group cut the largest stake of all the investors tracked by Insider Monkey, comprising about $6.3 million in stock, and Matthew Hulsizer’s PEAK6 Capital Management was right behind this move, as the fund cut about $1.7 million worth of shares.
Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Worthington Industries, Inc. (NYSE:WOR). We will take a look at Horizon Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:HZNP), Kate Spade & Co (NYSE:KATE), Logitech International SA (USA) (NASDAQ:LOGI), and UMB Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:UMBF). This group of stocks’ market caps are similar to WOR’s market cap.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| HZNP | 36 | 740593 | 9 |
| KATE | 29 | 535210 | -1 |
| LOGI | 11 | 68379 | 3 |
| UMBF | 9 | 64230 | 1 |
As you can see these stocks had an average of 21 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $352 million. That figure was $152 million in WOR’s case. Horizon Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:HZNP) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand UMB Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:UMBF) is the least popular one with only 9 bullish hedge fund positions. Worthington Industries, Inc. (NYSE:WOR) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard HZNP might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.
Disclosure: None
