A Look at Five Trending Stocks on Friday

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US stock market inched up on Friday amid job data that showed that the US added 215,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate grew slightly to 5% from 4.9% on the back of an increase in labor force participation rather than job losses. On the other hand, a report published by the Bank of Japan on Friday showed that the business confidence in the country has slipped to its lowest levels in three years. Among the trending stocks today are Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY), Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc (NYSE:HOT), Marriott International Inc (NASDAQ:MAR), and TerraForm Power Inc (NASDAQ:TERP). In this article we are going to take a look at the latest developments surrounding these stocks and see what the funds from our database think about them.

At Insider Monkey, we track around 730 hedge funds and institutional investors. Through extensive backtests, we have determined that imitating some of the stocks that these investors are collectively bullish on can help retail investors generate double digits of alpha per year. The key is to focus on the small-cap picks of these funds, which are usually less followed by the broader market and allow for larger price inefficiencies (see more details about our small-cap strategy).

Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s stock opened higher, but has slightly retreated and settled at around 3% in the green after the company unveiled its low-cost Model 3 Sedan on Thursday. The car starts from the base price of $35,000 excluding tax credits and incentives. The production is set to start by 2017 and pre-orders surpassed 130,000 within the first 24 hours, beating all estimates. After this development, Dougherty upped Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’a price target to $500, which is much higher than the closing price of $229 a day earlier. At the end of the fourth quarter, 29 of the hedge funds track by us held positions in Tesla, with a total value of $837.4 million, representing some 2.7% of the company’s outstanding stock. Daniel Benton’s Andor Capital Management owns approximately 1 million shares of the company.

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BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY)’s shares tumbled by 8% today following the company’s earnings report for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. The Canadian phone market reported a revenue of $487 million, down by 26% on year-on-year basis and $76 million lower than expected. However, Blackberry’s loss of $0.03 per share, was better than the loss of $0.10 estimated by analysts. BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) is undergoing a major transformation from hardware to software and 32% of the company’s revenue came from software and services. John Chen, CEO of Blackberry, expressed his satisfaction over the software side of the business. The company added that  it expects a growth in software and services business by 30% and positive free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA for the full fiscal 2017. Overall, 24 hedge funds out of those tracked by Insider Monkey held positions in Blackberry heading into 2016, having amassed 16.1% of the company’s stock.  Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial Holdings reported ownership of approximately 46 million shares in the company in its last 13F filing.

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