Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Hilltop Holdings Inc. (HTH)

The 700+ hedge funds and money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the third quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of September 30. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund positions. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE:HTH) .

Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE:HTH) was in 15 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. HTH investors should be aware of an increase in hedge fund interest of late. There were 14 hedge funds in our database with HTH holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare HTH to other stocks including INC Research Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:INCR), Northstar Realty Finance Corp. (NYSE:NRF), and Boyd Gaming Corporation (NYSE:BYD) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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.

How are hedge funds trading Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE:HTH)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 15 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a drop of 7% from one quarter earlier. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in HTH over the last 5 quarters. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management holds the biggest position in Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE:HTH). Millennium Management has a $13.3 million position in the stock. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Ratan Capital Group, led by Nehal Chopra, holding a $6.5 million position; the fund has 4.8% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other professional money managers with similar optimism contain Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors, and Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management. 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.

As one would reasonably expect, key hedge funds were leading the bulls’ herd. Arrowstreet Capital, led by Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell, created the largest position in Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE:HTH). Arrowstreet Capital had $3.5 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Porter Collins, Daniel Moses, and Vincent Daniel’s Seawolf Capital also made a $1.4 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new HTH positions are Sharif Siddiqui’s Alpenglow Capital, Matthew Tewksbury’s Stevens Capital Management, and Glenn Russell Dubin’s Highbridge Capital Management.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE:HTH) but similarly valued. These stocks are INC Research Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:INCR), Northstar Realty Finance Corp. (NYSE:NRF), Boyd Gaming Corporation (NYSE:BYD), and Artisan Partners Asset Management Inc (NYSE:APAM). This group of stocks’ market caps are similar to HTH’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 24 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $361 million. That figure was $35 million in HTH’s case. Northstar Realty Finance Corp. (NYSE:NRF) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Artisan Partners Asset Management Inc (NYSE:APAM) is the least popular one with only 10 bullish hedge fund positions. Hilltop Holdings Inc. (NYSE:HTH) 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 NRF might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None