How Jamba, Inc. (JMBA) Stacks Up Against Its Peers

Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.

Is Jamba, Inc. (NASDAQ:JMBA) a worthy investment right now? Hedge funds are actually selling. The number of bullish hedge fund positions that are disclosed in regulatory 13F filings suffered a reduction of 1 lately. JMBA was in 7 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 8 hedge funds in our database with JMBA holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare JMBA to other stocks including Maxwell Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:MXWL), Premier Financial Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:PFBI), and Advanced Emissions Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADES) 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.

Hedge fund activity in Jamba, Inc. (NASDAQ:JMBA)

At Q3’s end, a total of 7 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a drop of 13% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards JMBA over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s find out 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, Engaged Capital, led by Glenn W. Welling, holds the largest position in Jamba, Inc. (NASDAQ:JMBA). Engaged Capital has a $22.7 million position in the stock, comprising 8.3% of its 13F portfolio. On Engaged Capital’s heels is Indus Capital, led by David Kowitz and Sheldon Kasowitz, which holds a $14.2 million position; the fund has 1.3% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors that are bullish comprise Gregg J. Powers’ Private Capital Management, Jamie Mendola’s Pacific Grove Capital and Gregory Bylinsky and Jefferson Gramm’s Bandera Partners. We should note that Indus Capital is 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.

Since Jamba, Inc. (NASDAQ:JMBA) has gone through declining sentiment from the smart money, we can see that there lies a certain “tier” of money managers that elected to cut their entire stakes heading into Q4. At the top of the heap, David Kowitz and Sheldon Kasowitz’s Indus Capital cut the largest position of the “upper crust” of funds watched by Insider Monkey, worth close to $0.9 million in call options. Matthew Hulsizer’s fund, PEAK6 Capital Management, also cut its stock, about $0.3 million worth.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Jamba, Inc. (NASDAQ:JMBA). These stocks are Maxwell Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:MXWL), Premier Financial Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:PFBI), Advanced Emissions Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADES), and Westmoreland Coal Company (NASDAQ:WLB). This group of stocks’ market valuations are closest to JMBA’s market valuation.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 8 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $28 million. That figure was $56 million in JMBA’s case. Westmoreland Coal Company (NASDAQ:WLB) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Maxwell Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:MXWL) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Jamba, Inc. (NASDAQ:JMBA) 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 WLB might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None