Do Hedge Funds and Insiders Love Prologis Inc (PLD)?

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Is Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD) worth your attention right now? The best stock pickers are taking an optimistic view. The number of bullish hedge fund bets moved up by 1 in recent months.

If you’d ask most investors, hedge funds are assumed to be unimportant, outdated financial tools of the past. While there are more than 8000 funds trading at present, we at Insider Monkey choose to focus on the crème de la crème of this club, around 450 funds. Most estimates calculate that this group oversees most of the smart money’s total asset base, and by watching their top picks, we have identified a number of investment strategies that have historically outperformed the broader indices. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy beat the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per year for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have topped the S&P 500 index by 23.3 percentage points in 8 months (check out a sample of our picks).

Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD)Equally as beneficial, optimistic insider trading activity is another way to break down the marketplace. Obviously, there are plenty of incentives for an upper level exec to cut shares of his or her company, but just one, very obvious reason why they would behave bullishly. Several empirical studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this method if you understand what to do (learn more here).

With all of this in mind, it’s important to take a peek at the key action surrounding Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD).

Hedge fund activity in Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD)

At the end of the first quarter, a total of 18 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of 6% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings significantly.

According to our comprehensive database, AEW Capital Management, managed by Jeffrey Furber, holds the largest position in Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD). AEW Capital Management has a $213.2 million position in the stock, comprising 5.3% of its 13F portfolio. On AEW Capital Management’s heels is D. E. Shaw of D E Shaw, with a $101.5 million position; the fund has 0.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other hedgies that are bullish include Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies and Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management.

As one would reasonably expect, specific money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. Renaissance Technologies, managed by Jim Simons, initiated the most outsized position in Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD). Renaissance Technologies had 35 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management also made a $10.2 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are John M. Angelo and Michael L. Gordon’s Angelo Gordon & Co, Robert Rodriguez and Steven Romick’s First Pacific Advisors LLC, and David Costen Haley’s HBK Investments.

What have insiders been doing with Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD)?

Bullish insider trading is most useful when the company we’re looking at has experienced transactions within the past 180 days. Over the last 180-day time frame, Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD) has experienced zero unique insiders buying, and 5 insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

Let’s check out hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to Prologis Inc (NYSE:PLD). These stocks are DCT Industrial Trust Inc. (NYSE:DCT), CubeSmart (NYSE:CUBE), Biomed Realty Trust Inc (NYSE:BMR), Extra Space Storage, Inc. (NYSE:EXR), and Duke Realty Corp (NYSE:DRE). This group of stocks belong to the reit – industrial industry and their market caps are closest to PLD’s market cap.

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