Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (ALNY): Insiders Aren’t Crazy About It But Hedge Funds Love It

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Who’s crazy about Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY)?

If you were to ask many market players, hedge funds are seen as useless, outdated financial tools of a period lost to current times. Although there are In excess of 8,000 hedge funds with their doors open today, Insider Monkey looks at the moguls of this group, around 525 funds. Analysts calculate that this group oversees most of the smart money’s total capital, and by tracking their best picks, we’ve unearthed a few investment strategies that have historically outperformed Mr. Market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outpaced the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per year for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have topped the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (find the details here).

Equally as necessary, positive insider trading activity is a second way to look at the marketplace. Just as you’d expect, there are a number of incentives for a corporate insider to get rid of shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would initiate a purchase. Many academic studies have demonstrated the useful potential of this strategy if investors know what to do (learn more here).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s analyze the newest info surrounding Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY).

How are hedge funds trading Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY)?

At Q2’s end, a total of 19 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of 12% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes considerably.

Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY)Out of the hedge funds we follow, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group had the most valuable position in Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY), worth close to $36.8 million, comprising 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. On Citadel Investment Group’s heels is Bridger Management, managed by Roberto Mignone, which held a $31.8 million position; 2.3% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Remaining peers that are bullish include Stephen DuBois’s Camber Capital Management, James E. Flynn’s Deerfield Management and Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors.

As aggregate interest spiked, certain bigger names have been driving this bullishness. Citadel Investment Group, managed by Ken Griffin, assembled the biggest position in Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY). Citadel Investment Group had 36.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Roberto Mignone’s Bridger Management also made a $31.8 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new ALNY investors: Stephen DuBois’s Camber Capital Management, James E. Flynn’s Deerfield Management, and Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors.

What do corporate executives and insiders think about Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY)?

Bullish insider trading is at its handiest when the company we’re looking at has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the latest half-year time period, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY) has experienced zero unique insiders purchasing, and 6 insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

We’ll check out the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY). These stocks are Arena Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ARNA), Acorda Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:ACOR), ImmunoGen, Inc. (NASDAQ:IMGN), Viropharma Inc (NASDAQ:VPHM), and Synageva BioPharma Corp (NASDAQ:GEVA). This group of stocks are the members of the biotechnology industry and their market caps are closest to ALNY’s market cap.

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