Is St. Joe Co (JOE) A Good Stock To Buy?

As industrywide interest jumped, key money managers were breaking ground themselves. Marshall Wace LLP, led by Paul Marshall and Ian Wace, initiated the biggest position in St. Joe Co (NYSE:JOE). Marshall Wace LLP had $0.7 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital also made a $0.4 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new JOE positions are Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, Andrew Weiss’s Weiss Asset Management, and Matthew Hulsizer’s PEAK6 Capital Management.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as TSt. Joe Co (NYSE:JOE) but similarly valued. These stocks are Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (NYSE:GPI), ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFBS), Acceleron Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:XLRN), and SkyWest, Inc. (NASDAQ:SKYW). This group of stocks’ market values are similar to JOE’s market value.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 16 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $127 million. That figure was $484 million in JOE’s case. Acceleron Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:XLRN) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand ServisFirst Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFBS) is the least popular one with only 6 bullish hedge fund positions. St. Joe Co (NYSE:JOE) 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 XLRN might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.