Do Hedge Funds Love Morphic Holding, Inc. (MORF)?

The financial regulations require hedge funds and wealthy investors that exceeded the $100 million holdings threshold to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings to a certain extent level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings disclosed the funds’ positions on September 30th. We at Insider Monkey have made an extensive database of more than 867 of those established hedge funds and famous value investors’ filings. In this article, we analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF) based on those filings.

Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF) shareholders have witnessed an increase in hedge fund interest recently. Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF) was in 21 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 22. There were 19 hedge funds in our database with MORF positions at the end of the second quarter. Our calculations also showed that MORF isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, lithium prices have more than doubled over the past year, so we go through lists like the 10 best EV 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. With all of this in mind we’re going to go over the fresh hedge fund action regarding Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF).

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

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 11% from the second quarter of 2021. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards MORF over the last 25 quarters. So, let’s examine which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

The largest stake in Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF) was held by EcoR1 Capital, which reported holding $223.8 million worth of stock at the end of September. It was followed by Perceptive Advisors with a $50.3 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Driehaus Capital, Alkeon Capital Management, and Point72 Asset Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position EcoR1 Capital allocated the biggest weight to Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF), around 7.79% of its 13F portfolio. DAFNA Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 2.73 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to MORF.

Consequently, some big names have jumped into Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF) headfirst. Holocene Advisors, managed by Brandon Haley, established the most valuable position in Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF). Holocene Advisors had $14.7 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group also initiated a $2.6 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new MORF positions are Kamran Moghtaderi’s Eversept Partners, Mika Toikka’s AlphaCrest Capital Management, and Frank Fu’s CaaS Capital.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF). We will take a look at Enerplus Corp (NYSE:ERF), Maxar Technologies Inc (NYSE:MAXR), Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. (NYSE:TR), Palomar Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLMR), Four Corners Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE:FCPT), Realogy Holdings Corp (NYSE:RLGY), and Renasant Corporation (NASDAQ:RNST). This group of stocks’ market values match MORF’s market value.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 13.4 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $101 million. That figure was $406 million in MORF’s case. Realogy Holdings Corp (NYSE:RLGY) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Palomar Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLMR) is the least popular one with only 6 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Morphic Holding, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORF) is more popular among hedge funds. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for MORF is 85.6. 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 29.6% in 2021 and still beat the market by 3.6 percentage points. Unfortunately MORF wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on MORF were disappointed as the stock returned -16.3% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/31) 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 since 2019.

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