A Look At Three Activist Moves By Several Elite Hedge Funds

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According to the Schulte, Roth & Zabel’s Activist Investing 2015 Annual Review, 344 companies were targeted by activist investors in 2014, as compared with 291 recorded a year earlier. Shareholder activism has been surging in recent years and will most likely intensify in the upcoming years, considering the consistent performance of activist investors and their small ownership in U.S. equities. More capital has been flowing into activist funds over the past several years, so U.S. equity markets will most likely witness an extension of the shareholder activism arena over the next years. Having this in mind, this article focuses on three 13D (activist) filings submitted with the SEC by several widely-known hedge funds monitored by Insider Monkey.

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According to a Schedule 13D filing, Baker Bros. Advisors, managed by Julian and Felix Baker, owns 4.87 million shares in Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:BLCM), which account for 18.4% of the company’s outstanding common stock. This compares with the 4.19 million-share position disclosed in the fund’s latest 13F filing. This clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that focuses on discovering and developing novel cellular immunotherapies for different types of cancer has seen its shares decline by 12% this year. The company utilizes its proprietary Chemical Induction of Dimerization (CID) technology platform to engineer and control certain components of the immune system in real time. Nonetheless, Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:BLCM) has not generated any product revenue just yet, but has recorded revenue from government grants. The company’s leading product candidate, BPX-500, is developed as an adjunct T-cell therapy that is administered after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) with the aim of improving transplant outcomes by speeding up the recovery of the immune system after an HSCT procedure. However, it is still a long road until this product candidate reaches the market, considering that BPX-501 is currently studied in several Phase ½ clinical trials in the U.S. and Europe. A total of 15 hedge funds from our database were invested in the biopharmaceutical company at the end of the third quarter, which amassed 30.40% of its outstanding shares. Israel Englander’s Millennium Management owns nearly 993,000 shares in Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:BLCM) as of September 30.

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Let’s move on to the next page of this article, where we discuss the 13Ds submitted by Leon Cooperman and Orbimed Advisors.

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