Do Hedge Funds Love TechTarget Inc (TTGT)?

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. We at Insider Monkey have plowed through 821 13F filings that hedge funds and well-known value investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of March 31st, a week after the market trough. In this article we look at what those investors think of TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT).

TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT) has seen a decrease in hedge fund interest of late. Our calculations also showed that TTGT 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.

To most investors, hedge funds are assumed to be slow, old investment vehicles of the past. While there are over 8000 funds in operation at the moment, Our experts choose to focus on the masters of this club, about 850 funds. These investment experts administer bulk of the smart money’s total capital, and by tailing their matchless stock picks, Insider Monkey has identified numerous investment strategies that have historically exceeded Mr. Market. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy outrun the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points per annum 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. For example, blockchain technology’s influence will go beyond online payments. So, we are checking out this futurist’s moonshot opportunities in tech stocks. We interview hedge fund managers and ask them about their best ideas. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. For example we are checking out stocks recommended/scorned by legendary Bill Miller. Our best call in 2020 was shorting the market when the S&P 500 was trading at 3150 in February after realizing the coronavirus pandemic’s significance before most investors. Keeping this in mind let’s analyze the fresh hedge fund action encompassing TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT).

What have hedge funds been doing with TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT)?

At Q1’s end, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -13% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 17 hedge funds with a bullish position in TTGT a year ago. So, let’s examine which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies has the most valuable position in TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT), worth close to $21.3 million, corresponding to less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Cowbird Capital, led by Scott Coulter, holding a $8.9 million position; the fund has 8.9% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism contain Douglas T. Granat’s Trigran Investments, Brian Bares, Russell Mollen, and James Bradshaw’s Nine Ten Partners and David Park’s Headlands Capital. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Cowbird Capital allocated the biggest weight to TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT), around 8.91% of its 13F portfolio. Headlands Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 5.54 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to TTGT.

Since TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT) has witnessed falling interest from the smart money, it’s easy to see that there exists a select few hedgies who were dropping their full holdings last quarter. At the top of the heap, Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp dumped the biggest position of the 750 funds monitored by Insider Monkey, totaling an estimated $0.5 million in stock, and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw was right behind this move, as the fund sold off about $0.4 million worth. These transactions are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds last quarter.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT). We will take a look at Owens & Minor, Inc. (NYSE:OMI), Brookdale Senior Living, Inc. (NYSE:BKD), Cornerstone Building Brands, Inc. (NYSE:CNR), and OFG Bancorp (NYSE:OFG). This group of stocks’ market caps resemble TTGT’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 16.25 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $94 million. That figure was $60 million in TTGT’s case. Cornerstone Building Brands, Inc. (NYSE:CNR) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand OFG Bancorp (NYSE:OFG) is the least popular one with only 12 bullish hedge fund positions. TechTarget Inc (NASDAQ:TTGT) 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 13.3% in 2020 through June 25th and still beat the market by 16.8 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on TTGT as the stock returned 44.5% during the second quarter and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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