Why These 5 Stocks are Pushing the Market Up on Thursday

Wall Street is making up for some of its declines in 2016 today, with the three major indices all well above 0.5% in Thursday trading. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the stocks that are in the green today and helping push the market those gains, including Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C), NXP Semiconductors NV (NASDAQ:NXPI), Fastenal Company (NASDAQ:FAST), Glu Mobile Inc. (NASDAQ:GLUU), and Teradata Corporation (NYSE:TDC). We’ll also look at the hedge fund sentiment towards these stocks.

Imitating hedge funds and other institutional investors can help identify some of the most profitable stocks on the market. However, our extensive research that covered the period between 1999 and 2012, showed that the best approach is to follow these investors into their small-cap stocks. Our backtests showed that the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds managed to generate a monthly alpha of 81 basis points, versus an alpha of 0.7 percentage points posted by their top 50 large-cap picks (see more details here).

Back to the day’s gainers, we’ll start with Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C), which is trading up by almost 2.5% on the news that the bank will pay $23 million to settle its yen Libor manipulation lawsuit. The documents were filed on Monday in the U.S District Court in Manhattan, with the settlement awaiting court approval. Moreover, Citigroup has taken a position of cooperation with the plaintiffs. The lawyer for the latter group justifies the agreement based on the “limited participation” of the bank in this case, which generated a significant impact in Europe, Asia, and the U.S.

Among the funds we follow, 121 funds in our system were long Citigroup at the end of the third quarter, down slightly from the end of the second quarter. Boykin Curry’s Eagle Capital Management reported holding a $1.21 billion position in the stock as of the end of September.

Next up is NXP Semiconductors NV (NASDAQ:NXPI), up by over 6% in Thursday trading on the back of the company posting its financial results for the fourth quarter. The semiconductor company, one of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s suppliers, reported that its total revenue increased by 4.5% to $1.61 billion year-over-year, while its profit advanced to $1.25 per share. Moreover, the results exceeded analysts’ estimates by $0.18 in EPS and $300 million in revenue. Gross margin also reached 50.2%, advancing by 360 basis points year-over-year.

NXP Semiconductors NV (NASDAQ:NXPI) lost popularity among the funds that we track in the third quarter of 2015, as out of the 730 funds in our system, 59 of them held shares of the company on September 30, down from 69 on June 30. Eric W. Mandelblatt‘s Soroban Capital Partners was the largest shareholder of NXP Semiconductors NV (NASDAQ:NXPI) in our system, with 5.05 million shares.

Next up is Fastenal Company (NASDAQ:FAST), whose shares are up by about 12% today, seemingly on no particular news. After initially falling following the full line construction and industrial supplier providing disappointing financial results in mid-January, the stock has steadily rebounded, even in the face of a highly critical article published on TheStreet this week which dubbed the stock the worst in the world. Fastenal shares are up by 6% year-to-date. Robert Joseph Caruso‘s Select Equity Group was the largest shareholder of Fastenal in our database on September 30, owning 2.59 million shares.

The big day for both Glu Mobile and Teradata is summed up on the next page.