Is Cedar Fair, L.P. (FUN) a Good Stock to Buy?

The successful funds run by legendary investors such as Dan Loeb and David Tepper make hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves and their investors by spending enormous resources doing research on small cap stocks that big investment banks don’t follow. Because of their pay structures, they have strong incentive to do the research necessary to beat the market. That’s why we pay close attention to what they think in small cap stocks. In this article, we take a closer look at Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN) from the perspective of those successful funds.

Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN) shareholders have witnessed an increase in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds of late. There were 12 funds in our database with FUN positions at the end of September. 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 ITT Corp (NYSE:ITT), Medidata Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:MDSO), and Black Hills Corp (NYSE:BKH) to gather more data points.

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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.

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Now, we’re going to take a gander at the recent action surrounding Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN).

What have hedge funds been doing with Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 12 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, versus 10 funds a quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 8 hedge funds with a bullish position in FUN at the beginning of this year. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
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According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, MSDC Management, led by Marc Lisker, Glenn Fuhrman and John Phelan, holds the number one position in Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN). MSDC Management has a $105.1 million position in the stock, comprising 8.5% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by John Osterweis’ Osterweis Capital Management, which disclosed a $24.5 million position; the fund has 1.5% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other peers that hold long positions include Remy Trafelet’s Trafelet Capital, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, and Charles Davidson’s Wexford 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.

As industrywide interest jumped, key money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. Charles Davidson’s Wexford Capital established the biggest position in Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN). Wexford Capital had $3.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners also made a $2.4 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new FUN investors: Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, Stephen Loukas, David A. Lorber, Zachary George’s FrontFour Capital Group, and Paul Marshall and Ian Wace’s Marshall Wace LLP.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN). These stocks are ITT Corp (NYSE:ITT), Medidata Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:MDSO), Black Hills Corp (NYSE:BKH), and Methanex Corporation (USA) (NASDAQ:MEOH). All of these stocks’ market caps match FUN’s market cap.

Ticker No of HFs with positions Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) Change in HF Position
ITT 17 181338 3
MDSO 16 83886 7
BKH 13 322127 -5
MEOH 17 107936 7

As you can see these stocks had an average of 16 funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $174 million. That figure was $161 million in FUN’s case. ITT Corp (NYSE:ITT) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Black Hills Corp (NYSE:BKH) is the least popular one with only 13 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Cedar Fair, L.P. (NYSE:FUN) is even less popular than BKH. Considering that hedge funds aren’t fond of this stock in relation to other companies analyzed in this article, it may be a good idea to analyze it in detail and understand why the smart money isn’t behind this stock. This isn’t necessarily bad news. Although it is possible that hedge funds may think the stock is overpriced and view the stock as a short candidate, they may not be very familiar with the bullish thesis. In either case more research is warranted.

Disclosure: none