Did Hedge Funds Make The Right Call On YETI Holdings, Inc. (YETI) ?

Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and successful value investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds’ and successful investors’ positions as of the end of the first quarter. You can find articles about an individual hedge fund’s trades on numerous financial news websites. However, in this article we will take a look at their collective moves over the last 4.5 years and analyze what the smart money thinks of YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI) based on that data and determine whether they were really smart about the stock.

Is YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI) a safe investment right now? The smart money was getting more bullish. The number of long hedge fund positions went up by 3 in recent months. Our calculations also showed that YETI isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks).

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

If you’d ask most stock holders, hedge funds are viewed as slow, outdated financial tools of the past. While there are greater than 8000 funds with their doors open at the moment, Our researchers look at the leaders of this club, approximately 850 funds. These hedge fund managers shepherd bulk of all hedge funds’ total asset base, and by keeping an eye on their inimitable picks, Insider Monkey has formulated various investment strategies that have historically surpassed the S&P 500 index. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy exceeded the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points annually since its inception in March 2017. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 36% since February 2017 (through May 18th) even though the market was up 30% during the same period. We just shared a list of 8 short targets in our latest quarterly update .

At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. Hedge fund sentiment towards Tesla reached its all time high at the end of 2019 and Tesla shares more than tripled this year. We are trying to identify other EV revolution winners, so we are checking out this under-the-radar lithium stock. We go through lists like the 10 most profitable companies in the world to pick the best large-cap stocks to buy. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. If you want to find out the best healthcare stock to buy right now, you can watch our latest hedge fund manager interview here. Now let’s take a look at the key hedge fund action encompassing YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI).

How are hedge funds trading YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI)?

At Q1’s end, a total of 20 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 18% from the fourth quarter of 2019. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards YETI over the last 18 quarters. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group has the most valuable position in YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI), worth close to $15 million, amounting to less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Principal Global Investors of Columbus Circle Investors, with a $9.6 million position; 0.5% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism comprise Doug Gordon, Jon Hilsabeck and Don Jabro’s Shellback Capital, Joseph Samuels’s Islet Management and Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Berylson Capital Partners allocated the biggest weight to YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI), around 5.15% of its 13F portfolio. Pinz Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 3.69 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to YETI.

As industrywide interest jumped, some big names have jumped into YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI) headfirst. Berylson Capital Partners, managed by James Thomas Berylson, created the largest position in YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI). Berylson Capital Partners had $1.9 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Paul Marshall and Ian Wace’s Marshall Wace LLP also initiated a $1.7 million position during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new YETI investors: Matthew L Pinz’s Pinz Capital, Greg Eisner’s Engineers Gate Manager, and Sander Gerber’s Hudson Bay Capital Management.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Artisan Partners Asset Management Inc (NYSE:APAM), Fate Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:FATE), Golub Capital BDC Inc (NASDAQ:GBDC), and Genworth Financial Inc (NYSE:GNW). This group of stocks’ market valuations are closest to YETI’s market valuation.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 22.25 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $266 million. That figure was $57 million in YETI’s case. Genworth Financial Inc (NYSE:GNW) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Golub Capital BDC Inc (NASDAQ:GBDC) is the least popular one with only 13 bullish hedge fund positions. YETI Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YETI) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our calculations showed that top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.4% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10.1 percentage points. These stocks gained 18.6% in 2020 through July 27th and still beat the market by 17.1 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on YETI as the stock returned 138.8% since the end of March and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.