Do Hedge Funds Love Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (MLM)?

We at Insider Monkey have gone over 700 13F filings that hedge funds and prominent investors are required to file by the government. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of September 30. In this article we look at what those investors think of Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (NYSE:MLM).

Is Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (NYSE:MLM) ready to rally soon? Hedge funds are betting on the stock. The number of bullish hedge fund bets improved by 2 recently. MLM was in 47 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 45 hedge funds in our database with MLM holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare MLM to other stocks, including Banco de Chile (ADR) (NYSE:BCH), Alaska Air Group, Inc. (NYSE:ALK), and Ralph Lauren Corp (NYSE:RL) to get a better sense of its popularity.

If you’d ask most market participants, hedge funds are assumed to be slow, outdated investment vehicles of yesteryear. While there are greater than an 8000 funds in operation today, Our experts look at the bigwigs of this club, about 700 funds. It is estimated that this group of investors have their hands on most of all hedge funds’ total capital, and by shadowing their first-class investments, Insider Monkey has identified a number of investment strategies that have historically defeated the market. Insider Monkey’s small-cap hedge fund strategy outpaced the S&P 500 index by 12 percentage points a year for a decade in their back tests.

Now, we’re going to take a glance at the latest action encompassing Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (NYSE:MLM).

How have hedgies been trading Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (NYSE:MLM)?

At the Q3’s end, a total of 47 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 4% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, John Armitage’s Egerton Capital Limited has the most valuable position in Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (NYSE:MLM), worth close to $400.5 million, comprising 4.5% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Tom Russo’s Gardner Russo & Gardner, with a $314.6 million position; 2.8% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Some other peers with similar optimism consist of David Cohen and Harold Levy’s Iridian Asset Management, John Smith Clark’s Southpoint Capital Advisors and Richard Chilton’s Chilton Investment Company.