Is Itau Unibanco Holding SA (ADR) (ITUB) A Good Stock To Buy?

Before we spend days researching a stock idea we’d like to take a look at how hedge funds and billionaire investors recently traded that stock. S&P 500 Index returned about 5.2% during the last 12 months ending October 30, 2015. Less than 49% of the stocks in the index outperformed the index. This means you (or a monkey throwing a dart) have less than an even chance of beating the market by randomly picking a stock. On the other hand, the top 30 S&P 500 stocks among hedge funds at the end of September 2014 had an average return of 9.5% during the same period. Sixty three percent of these 30 stocks outperformed the market. Hedge funds had bad stock picks like everyone else. Micron, which lost 50% over this period, was one of hedge funds’ 30 favorite S&P 500 stocks. Anadarko Petroleum was another failed stock pick which lost more than 26%. So, taking cues from hedge funds isn’t a foolproof strategy, but it seems to work on average. In this article, we will take a look at what hedge funds think about Itau Unibanco Holding SA (ADR) (NYSE:ITUB).

Itau Unibanco Holding SA (ADR) (NYSE:ITUB) has experienced a decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds recently. 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 EOG Resources Inc (NYSE:EOG), Monsanto Company (NYSE:MON), and Kimberly Clark Corp (NYSE:KMB) to gather more data points.

Keeping this in mind, we’re going to take a look at the recent action surrounding Itau Unibanco Holding SA (ADR) (NYSE:ITUB).

Hedge fund activity in Itau Unibanco Holding SA (ADR) (NYSE:ITUB)

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of -22% from the previous quarter. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management has the most valuable position in Itau Unibanco Holding SA (ADR) (NYSE:ITUB), worth close to $53.1 million, comprising 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Renaissance Technologies, managed by Jim Simons, which holds a $45 million position; 0.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Some other professional money managers that hold long positions contain Howard Marks’s Oaktree Capital Management,  D E Shaw and William B. Gray’s Orbis Investment Management.