Box Inc (BOX) Has Its First Major Shareholder, And It’s This Hedge Fund

As mentioned, Coatue Management is the only known investor in Box Inc (NYSE:BOX) at this time, so it’s difficult to gauge the overall interest amongst our tracked funds. We can however look to one of their competitors, Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX), which went public all the way back in 2008. At the time, Rackspace had a terrible launch, with their share offering price of $12.50 per share (which like Box’s, was also below initial estimates) crumbling to just $10.00 by the end of the first day of trading, and falling under $5.00 a few months later.

However Rackspace has enjoyed tremendous success since then, peaking at nearly $80.00 in early 2013, and currently trading at $46.39 with a market cap of $6.61 billion. Institutional ownership is high, accounting for 83% of all Common Shares, which shows a lot of optimism not only for the company, but the sector as well.

Our tracked funds were extremely bullish on Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) in the third quarter of 2014, with several opening new positions, and others greatly increasing their existing ones. Clifton S. Robbins’ Blue Harbour Group was the most bullish, with 9.10 million shares, a 159% increase from the previous quarter. Barry Rosenstein’s JANA Partners was next with 7.00 million, which was acquired entirely during that quarter, while Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management was next with 4.67 million shares, a 45% increase.

Rackspace responded to their bullishness by soaring 41.23% since October 1, which is exactly why we follow and track the activity of our selected funds, a method which has been proven to outperform the market. We’ll be carefully tracking further activity on Box Inc (NYSE:BOX) in the coming weeks as well to see if the same indicators point to its own future success.

Disclosure: None