Billionaire Jim Simons’s Renaissance And Insiders Like The Home Depot, Inc. (HD) and More

Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG) was another common pick between Renaissance and a company insider. The $50 billion market cap biopharmaceutical company is a growth play in the eyes of the market: it is up nearly 90% in the last year, carrying its trailing earnings multiple up to 36. Wall Street analysts expect high earnings growth going forward- in fact, the five-year PEG ratio is just below 1- though recent performance in terms of net income has not been good. D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund managed by billionaire David Shaw, owned 1.3 million shares of Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG) at the beginning of April (check out D.E. Shaw’s stock picks).

Renaissance increased its holdings of HollyFrontier Corp (NYSE:HFC), a $9.2 billion market cap refining and marketing company, to a total of nearly 3 million shares. An insider bought 2,000 shares of the stock in late March. The stock trades at 9 times forward earnings estimates, a similar valuation to that of many other downstream oil and gas companies. We’d note that these projections assume a decline in earnings per share over the next year and a half. AQR Capital Management, run by Cliff Asness and his team, was another major shareholder out of the funds we track (research more stocks AQR owns).

An insider was buying shares of Mead Johnson Nutrition CO (NYSE:MJN) in late April, with the fund owning 1.9 million shares of the infant’s and children’s nutrition products company a month prior. The stock carries trailing and forward P/Es of 27 and 22, respectively, despite fairly modest growth numbers; it appears to us that investors are hoping that China (a critical market) will relax its one-child policy. This would stimulate demand in the long run if it occurred, but we still think that we would prefer to avoid the stock rather than invest in these speculations.

Disclosure: I own no shares of any stocks mentioned in this article.