Hedge Funds Are Betting On Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NUS)

Many prominent investors, including Warren Buffett, David Tepper and Stan Druckenmiller, have been cautious regarding the current bull market and missed out as the stock market reached another high in recent weeks. On the other hand, technology hedge funds weren’t timid and registered double digit market beating gains. Financials, energy and industrial stocks initially suffered the most but many of these stocks delivered strong returns since November and hedge funds actually increased their positions in these stocks. In this article we will find out how hedge fund sentiment towards Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS) changed recently.

Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS) investors should pay attention to an increase in support from the world’s most elite money managers in recent months. Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS) was in 22 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 29. Our calculations also showed that NUS 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. Now we’re going to analyze the recent hedge fund action encompassing Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS).

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

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 22 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 10% from the second quarter of 2021. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards NUS over the last 25 quarters. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Among these funds, Renaissance Technologies held the most valuable stake in Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS), which was worth $112.1 million at the end of the third quarter. On the second spot was AQR Capital Management which amassed $41.6 million worth of shares. Arrowstreet Capital, Citadel Investment Group, and Portolan Capital Management 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 Prescott Group Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS), around 0.71% of its 13F portfolio. Portolan Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 0.36 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to NUS.

As industrywide interest jumped, key money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. PEAK6 Capital Management, managed by Matthew Hulsizer, initiated the most valuable position in Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS). PEAK6 Capital Management had $2.7 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw also initiated a $2.6 million position during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Jinghua Yan’s TwinBeech Capital, and Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS) but similarly valued. These stocks are Xenia Hotels & Resorts Inc (NYSE:XHR), Butterfly Network, Inc. (NYSE:BFLY), Revolution Medicines, Inc. (NASDAQ:RVMD), Centerra Gold Inc. (NYSE:CGAU), Ping Identity Holding Corp. (NYSE:PING), Amarin Corporation plc (NASDAQ:AMRN), and MFA Financial, Inc. (NYSE:MFA). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to NUS’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 15.9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $265 million. That figure was $199 million in NUS’s case. Butterfly Network, Inc. (NYSE:BFLY) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Centerra Gold Inc. (NYSE:CGAU) is the least popular one with only 6 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE:NUS) is more popular among hedge funds. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for NUS is 79.8. 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 returned 29.6% in 2021 and managed to beat the market by 3.6 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on NUS as the stock returned 26.4% since the end of September (through 12/31) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin. Hedge funds were clearly right about piling into this stock relative to other stocks with similar market capitalizations.

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