5 Most Shorted Stocks Hedge Funds Are Buying

4. Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 30 

Float Shorted: 23.96% 

Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT) operates in the cloud software industry. In the second quarter, the company posted earnings per share of -$0.31, beating estimates by $0.08. The revenue over the period was $88 million, up 64% year-on-year and beating predictions by over $11 million. The company debuted on the stock market in June and the stock soared by more than 30% on the second day of trading, pushing the valuation of the company beyond $11 billion. 

Deutsche Bank analyst Patrick Colville had raised the price target on Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT) stock to $42 from $37 in August but maintained a Hold rating following a “solid” second quarter earnings report. 

Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, Connecticut-based firm Lone Pine Capital is a leading shareholder in Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT) with 3.6 million shares worth more than $172 million. 

In its Q2 2021 investor letter, ClearBridge Investments, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“The new issue market remains an attractive source of new ideas and we participated in four IPOs in the latest period. Confluent sells and distributes a commercialized version of open source software called Kafka created by former executives at LinkedIn. The solution allows enterprise users the ability to capture data in real time as it is streaming. A prime use case is capturing real-time inventory across retail stores and distribution centers to enable omni-channel commerce. We believe it is early days in the company’s commercialization of this technology which can capture data in both on-premise and hybrid cloud environments. Global-e Online, meanwhile, removes many of the frictions around cross-border ecommerce by handling the different tax structures, languages, currencies, local logistics and fulfillment/returns for any size retailer. The company’s initial customers have been mostly mid to higher end retailers but an investment by Shopify should enable Global-e to significantly increase merchant reach.”