Did Hedge Funds Forseen the Quarterly Performance of these Two Companies?

Moving on to Thor Industries, Inc. (NYSE:THO), which reported a net income of $69 million or $1.31 per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015, compared to net income of $66.6 million or $1.25 per share it had reported for the same quarter last year. Analysts were projecting the company to report EPS of $1.30  for the quarter. Although the revenue of $1.06 billion that the company reported for the quarter was up 1.4% year-over-year, it missed analysts’ expectations of $1.15 billion. For the full fiscal year 2015, Thor Industries, Inc. (NYSE:THO) reported EPS of $3.80 on revenue of $4 billion, compared to estimated EPS of $3.79 and revenue of $4.10 billion. Sales of the towable RVs during the quarter were down 3% year-over-year and sales of motorized RVs also saw a year-over-year drop of 0.64%, however, the company managed to offset these lower figures with the revenue it earned through its recent acquisition of Postle Aluminum Co.

The stock of Thor Industries had a decent rally during the first three months of the year, but has witnessed gradual decline since then and currently trades marginally down by 2% year-to-date. This downward journey started at the beginning of the second quarter, perhaps explains why even though the number of hedge funds tracked that were long on the company increased to 18 from 16 during the quarter, the total value of their positions dropped by almost $110 million to $$263.66 million. Among these investors, Chuck Royce‘s Royce & Associates, which has been the largest shareholder of the company for the past several quarters (among the funds tracked by us), has been reducing its stake in it for the past three quarters and at the end of June held nearly 3.63 million shares. This continuous sale of shares by one of its largest shareholders, coupled with a lackluster popularity among the smart money and the quarterly performance of the company being not quite up to the mark, seems to suggest that Thor Industries’ stock will continue to remain range-bound in the near future like it has been in the past few weeks.

Disclosure: None