Do Hedge Funds Love Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (CCBG)?

Although the masses and most of the financial media blame hedge funds for their exorbitant fee structure and disappointing performance, these investors have proved to have great stock picking abilities over the years (that’s why their assets under management continue to swell). We believe hedge fund sentiment should serve as a crucial tool of an individual investor’s stock selection process, as it may offer great insights of how the brightest minds of the finance industry feel about specific stocks. After all, these people have access to smartest analysts and expensive data/information sources that individual investors can’t match. So should one consider investing in Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG)? The smart money sentiment can provide an answer to this question.

Is Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG) going to take off soon? The best stock pickers were selling. The number of long hedge fund bets were cut by 2 recently. Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG) was in 4 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 6. Our calculations also showed that CCBG isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings). There were 6 hedge funds in our database with CCBG positions at the end of the fourth quarter.

To most traders, hedge funds are viewed as worthless, old investment vehicles of years past. While there are greater than 8000 funds with their doors open today, Our researchers choose to focus on the moguls of this group, approximately 850 funds. These investment experts handle the lion’s share of the smart money’s total capital, and by paying attention to their matchless equity investments, Insider Monkey has determined several investment strategies that have historically outpaced the broader indices. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy surpassed the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points a year since its inception in March 2017. Also, our monthly newsletter’s portfolio of long stock picks returned 206.8% since March 2017 (through May 2021) and beat the S&P 500 Index by more than 115 percentage points. You can download a sample issue of this newsletter on our website .

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, an activist hedge fund wants to buy this $28 biotech stock for $50. So, we recommended a long position to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 10 best battery stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. 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. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. Keeping this in mind we’re going to review the latest hedge fund action encompassing Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG).

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

Heading into the second quarter of 2021, a total of 4 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -33% from one quarter earlier. By comparison, 3 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in CCBG a year ago. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies has the biggest position in Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG), worth close to $6.2 million, corresponding to less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, with a $0.6 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other professional money managers with similar optimism include Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners, Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates and . In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Renaissance Technologies allocated the biggest weight to Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG), around 0.01% of its 13F portfolio. Royce & Associates is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.003 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to CCBG.

Judging by the fact that Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG) has witnessed bearish sentiment from hedge fund managers, it’s safe to say that there is a sect of fund managers that slashed their positions entirely in the first quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Joel Greenblatt’s Gotham Asset Management sold off the biggest position of the “upper crust” of funds watched by Insider Monkey, totaling close to $0.8 million in stock, and Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $0.3 million worth. These bearish behaviors are intriguing to say the least, as total hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds in the first quarter.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG). These stocks are Greenwich LifeSciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:GLSI), Xunlei Ltd (NASDAQ:XNET), ClearPoint Neuro Inc. (NASDAQ:CLPT), Intrepid Potash, Inc. (NYSE:IPI), Daily Journal Corporation (NASDAQ:DJCO), Tuscan Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ:THCB), and Huize Holding Limited (NASDAQ:HUIZ). This group of stocks’ market values resemble CCBG’s market value.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 5.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $16 million. That figure was $8 million in CCBG’s case. Tuscan Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ:THCB) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Daily Journal Corporation (NASDAQ:DJCO) is the least popular one with only 1 bullish hedge fund positions. Capital City Bank Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:CCBG) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for CCBG is 39.7. 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. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. 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 17.2% in 2021 through June 11th and surpassed the market again by 3.3 percentage points. Unfortunately CCBG wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); CCBG investors were disappointed as the stock returned 1.8% since the end of March (through 6/11) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2021.

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