Do Hedge Funds Love Cameco Corporation (CCJ)?

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. Insider Monkey finished processing 873 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of June 30th, 2021. In this article we are going to take a look at smart money sentiment towards Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ).

Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ) was in 25 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 30. CCJ has seen a decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds in recent months. There were 30 hedge funds in our database with CCJ positions at the end of the first quarter. Our calculations also showed that CCJ isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

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Do Hedge Funds Think CCJ Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At Q2’s end, a total of 25 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -17% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 22 hedge funds with a bullish position in CCJ a year ago. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

Among these funds, Kopernik Global Investors held the most valuable stake in Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ), which was worth $175.8 million at the end of the second quarter. On the second spot was MFN Partners which amassed $144.8 million worth of shares. Citadel Investment Group, Moore Global Investments, and Citadel Investment Group were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Kopernik Global Investors allocated the biggest weight to Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ), around 18.43% of its 13F portfolio. Moerus Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 10.7 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to CCJ.

Since Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ) has witnessed falling interest from hedge fund managers, it’s safe to say that there were a few hedge funds that slashed their entire stakes heading into Q3. It’s worth mentioning that Richard Driehaus’s Driehaus Capital dumped the biggest stake of the “upper crust” of funds watched by Insider Monkey, comprising about $6.2 million in stock. Dmitry Balyasny’s fund, Balyasny Asset Management, also dropped its stock, about $5.1 million worth. These bearish behaviors are important to note, as total hedge fund interest dropped by 5 funds heading into Q3.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ) but similarly valued. These stocks are Acceleron Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:XLRN), Zhihu Inc. (NYSE:ZH), II-VI, Inc. (NASDAQ:IIVI), Crocs, Inc. (NASDAQ:CROX), Old Republic International Corporation (NYSE:ORI), Shift4 Payments, Inc. (NYSE:FOUR), and Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:KC). This group of stocks’ market caps are closest to CCJ’s market cap.

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As you can see these stocks had an average of 27.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $568 million. That figure was $587 million in CCJ’s case. Acceleron Pharma Inc (NASDAQ:XLRN) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Zhihu Inc. (NYSE:ZH) is the least popular one with only 10 bullish hedge fund positions. Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for CCJ is 47.7. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. Our calculations showed that top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 24% in 2021 through October 22nd and still beat the market by 1.6 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on CCJ as the stock returned 35.2% since the end of the second quarter (through 10/22) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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