CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (CF)’s Stock Is Trading Lower Amid of Downgrades

CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF)’s stock is down over 5% after three investment banks downgraded the stock today. The analysts at Cleveland Research downgraded CF to ‘Neutral’ from ‘Buy’, while the analysts at Scotiabank lowered their rating to ‘Sector Perform’ from ‘Outperform’. The professionals at Bank of America were the most bearish, lowering their rating to ‘Underperform’ from ‘Neutral’. The analyst downgrades follow yesterday’s news that CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF) terminated its acquisition of some of OCI’s assets due to unfavorable changes in tax inversion rules. The market was hoping for substantial synergies that now won’t be realized.

Is CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF) a good investment today? The best stock pickers are selling. The number of bullish hedge fund positions dropped by five lately. CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF) was in the equity portfolios of 32 funds in our database at the end of March. At the end of this article we will also compare CF to other stocks, including Xylem Inc (NYSE:XYL), Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corp (NYSE:WAB), and F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Passport Capital, managed by John Burbank, holds the largest position in CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF). Passport Capital has a $349.8 million position in the stock, comprising 5.7% of its 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, with a $218.4 million position; 0.4% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Other professional money managers with similar optimism include Robert Polak’s Anchor Bolt Capital and Thomas Steyer’s Farallon Capital.

On the next page, we are going to take a closer look at some funds that decided to close their positions in CF Industries during the first three months of 2016.