Do Hedge Funds and Insiders Love SINA Corp (SINA)?

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Is SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA) a buy?

In the eyes of many of your peers, hedge funds are assumed to be delayed, old financial tools of an era lost to time. Although there are over 8,000 hedge funds with their doors open currently, Insider Monkey aim at the aristocrats of this club, around 525 funds. It is widely held that this group oversees the lion’s share of the smart money’s total assets, and by paying attention to their best stock picks, we’ve identified a few investment strategies that have historically outperformed the market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outperformed the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points a year for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve started sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have topped the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (find the details here).

Just as key, positive insider trading activity is another way to look at the investments you’re interested in. Just as you’d expect, there are many reasons for an executive to get rid of shares of his or her company, but just one, very clear reason why they would behave bullishly. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this method if shareholders know what to do (learn more here).

SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA)

Thus, it’s important to discuss the latest info about SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA).

How are hedge funds trading SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA)?

At Q2’s end, a total of 26 of the hedge funds we track were bullish in this stock, a change of 0% from the first quarter. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes substantially.

Out of the hedge funds we follow, Platinum Asset Management, managed by Kerr Neilson, holds the biggest position in SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA). Platinum Asset Management has a $276.4 million position in the stock, comprising 5.3% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Emerging Sovereign Group, managed by J Kevin Kenny Jr, which held a $108.8 million position; 4.5% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other hedge funds that are bullish include Robert Boucai’s Newbrook Capital Advisors, Christopher Medlock James’s Partner Fund Management and Israel Englander’s Millennium Management.

As SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA) has faced dropping sentiment from the top-tier hedge fund industry, we can see that there was a specific group of money managers who sold off their full holdings last quarter. At the top of the heap, Robert Karr’s Joho Capital cut the largest investment of the “upper crust” of funds we key on, worth about $39.3 million in stock, and Brian Kelly of Asian Century Quest was right behind this move, as the fund said goodbye to about $26.7 million worth. These transactions are important to note, as total hedge fund interest stayed the same (this is a bearish signal in our experience).

How are insiders trading SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA)?

Insider buying made by high-level executives is most useful when the primary stock in question has seen transactions within the past half-year. Over the last six-month time frame, SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA) has experienced zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

We’ll also take a look at the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to SINA Corp (NASDAQ:SINA). These stocks are NetEase, Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:NTES), ExactTarget Inc (NYSE:ET), J2 Global Inc (NASDAQ:JCOM), Net Element Inc (PINK:NETE), and The Ultimate Software Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ULTI). All of these stocks are in the internet software & services industry and their market caps match SINA’s market cap.

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