Is Saia Inc (SAIA) A Good Stock To Buy?

There are several ways to beat the market, and investing in small cap stocks has historically been one of them. We like to improve the odds of beating the market further by examining what famous hedge fund operators such as Carl Icahn and George Soros think. Those hedge fund operators make billions of dollars each year by hiring the best and the brightest to do research on stocks, including small cap stocks that big brokerage houses simply don’t cover. Because of Carl Icahn and other successful funds’ exemplary historical records, we pay attention to their small cap picks. In this article, we use hedge fund filing data to analyze Saia Inc (NASDAQ:SAIA) .

Is Saia Inc (NASDAQ:SAIA) a healthy stock for your portfolio? Investors who are in the know are actually betting on the stock. The number of long hedge fund positions that are disclosed in regulatory 13F filings swelled by 2 recently. SAIAwas in 11 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 9 hedge funds in our database with SAIA holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare SAIA to other stocks including City Holding Company (NASDAQ:CHCO), Gray Television, Inc. (NYSE:GTN), and Nimble Storage Inc (NYSE:NMBL) 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.

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Now, let’s go over the key action surrounding Saia Inc (NASDAQ:SAIA).

How are hedge funds trading Saia Inc (NASDAQ:SAIA)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 11 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 22% from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 17 hedge funds with a bullish position in SAIA at the beginning of this year. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates has the most valuable position in Saia Inc (NASDAQ:SAIA), worth close to $35.4 million, accounting for 0.2% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Scopus Asset Management, led by Alexander Mitchell, holding a $8.8 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors that are bullish consist of Ira Unschuld’s Brant Point Investment Management, Anand Parekh’s Alyeska Investment Group and D E Shaw, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. 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.