Is Liberty Braves Group (BATRA) A Good Stock To Buy?

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The worries about the election and the ongoing uncertainty about the path of interest-rate increases have been keeping investors on the sidelines. Of course, most hedge funds and other asset managers have been underperforming main stock market indices since the middle of 2015. Interestingly though, smaller-cap stocks registered their best performance relative to the large-capitalization stocks since the end of the June quarter, suggesting that this may be the best time to take a cue from their stock picks. In fact, the Russell 2000 Index gained more than 15% since the beginning of the third quarter, while the Standard and Poor’s 500 benchmark returned less than 6%. This article will lay out and discuss the hedge fund and institutional investor sentiment towards Liberty Braves Group (NASDAQ:BATRA).

Liberty Braves Group (NASDAQ:BATRA) was in 15 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. BATRA investors should pay attention to a decrease in hedge fund interest recently. There were 18 hedge funds in our database with BATRA positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare BATRA to other stocks including BJ’s Restaurants, Inc. (NASDAQ:BJRI), DBV Technologies SA – ADR (NASDAQ:DBVT), and Cincinnati Bell Inc. (NYSE:CBB) 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.

 Shutter_M/Shutterstock.com

Shutter_M/Shutterstock.com

How have hedgies been trading Liberty Braves Group (NASDAQ:BATRA)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 15 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a fall of -17% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards BATRA 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.

HedgeFundSentimentChart (87)

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Debra Fine’s Fine Capital Partners has the largest position in Liberty Braves Group (NASDAQ:BATRA), worth close to $15.2 million, comprising 1.6% of its total 13F portfolio. On Fine Capital Partners’ heels is Seth Klarman of Baupost Group, with a $14 million position. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism encompass Kenneth Mario Garschina’s Mason Capital Management, Michael Thompson’s BHR Capital and Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors. 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.

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