Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Banner Corporation (BANR)

There are several ways to beat the market, and investing in small cap stocks has historically been one of them. We like to improve the odds of beating the market further by examining what famous hedge fund operators such as Carl Icahn and George Soros think. Those hedge fund operators make billions of dollars each year by hiring the best and the brightest to do research on stocks, including small cap stocks that big brokerage houses simply don’t cover. Because of Carl Icahn and other successful funds’ exemplary historical records, we pay attention to their small cap picks. In this article, we use hedge fund filing data to analyze Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR) .

Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR) saw a slight decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds last quarter. Among the funds we track at Insider Monkey, 16 funds held shares of the company at the end of September, compared to 17 funds a quarter earlier. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Nexstar Broadcasting Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:NXST), Euronav NV Ordinary Shares (NYSE:EURN), and AAON, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAON) to gather more data points.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

With all of this in mind, we’re going to check out the recent action regarding Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR).

What have hedge funds been doing with Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 16 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR), down by 6% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards BANR over the last fiveee quarters. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Howard Marks’ Oaktree Capital Management has the largest position in Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR), worth close to $108.2 million, accounting for 1.4% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Basswood Capital, led by Matthew Lindenbaum, which holds a $26.1 million position; the fund has 1.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining members of the smart money that are bullish include Emanuel J. Friedman’s EJF Capital, Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, and Mark Lee’s Forest Hill Capital. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.

We already know that not all hedge funds are bullish on the stock and some hedge funds actually cut their positions entirely. Interestingly, Matthew Tewksbury’s Stevens Capital Management cut the largest investment of all the investors watched by Insider Monkey, worth about $0.3 million in stock. John Overdeck and David Siegel’s fund, Two Sigma Advisors, also cut its stock worth about $0.3 million worth.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR). We will take a look at Nexstar Broadcasting Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:NXST), Euronav NV Ordinary Shares (NYSE:EURN), AAON, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAON), and Nomad Foods Limited Ordinary Shares (NYSE:NOMD). This group of stocks’ market values are closest to BANR’s market value.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 26 funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $518 million, whiuch is highher than the $185 million figure in BANR’s case. Nexstar Broadcasting Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:NXST) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand AAON, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAON) is the least popular one with only nine investors holding shares. Banner Corporation (NASDAQ:BANR) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard Nexstar Broadcasting Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:NXST) might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None