Hedge Funds Are Buying Trex Company Inc (TREX)

A whopping number of 13F filings filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been processed by Insider Monkey so that individual investors can look at the overall hedge fund sentiment towards the stocks included in their watchlists. These freshly-submitted public filings disclose money managers’ equity positions as of the end of the three-month period that ended September 30, so let’s proceed with the discussion of the hedge fund sentiment on Trex Company Inc (NYSE:TREX).

Is Trex Company Inc (NYSE:TREX) ready to rally soon? Money managers are definitely becoming hopeful. The number of bullish hedge fund bets that are revealed through the 13F filings rose by 3 in recent months. There were 10 hedge funds in our database with TREX positions at the end of September. At the end of this article we will also compare TREX to other stocks including Viavi Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:VIAV), Nelnet, Inc. (NYSE:NNI), and Herman Miller, Inc. (NASDAQ:MLHR) to get a better sense of its popularity.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

trade, forex, investment, gain, stock, phone, network, view, report, money, smart, background, broker, market, laptop, table, economy, display, loss, business, urban,

oneinchpunch/Shutterstock.com

How have hedgies been trading Trex Company Inc (NYSE:TREX)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 10 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, up by 43% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards TREX over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

HedgeFundSentimentChart

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, has the biggest position in Trex Company Inc (NYSE:TREX), worth close to $8.9 million. The second largest stake is held by Peter Muller of PDT Partners which holds a $2.8 million position. Other peers with similar optimism comprise Bernard Horn’s Polaris Capital Management, and John Osterweis’ Osterweis Capital Management. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.

Consequently, key hedge funds were leading the bulls’ herd. Millennium Management assembled the largest position in Trex Company Inc (NYSE:TREX) which had $1.9 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Joel Greenblatt’s Gotham Asset Management also made a $1.3 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management, Mike Vranos’ Ellington, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Trex Company Inc (NYSE:TREX) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Viavi Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:VIAV), Nelnet, Inc. (NYSE:NNI), Herman Miller, Inc. (NASDAQ:MLHR), and Sohu.com Inc (NASDAQ:SOHU). This group of stocks’ market values match TREX’s market value.

Ticker No of HFs with positions Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) Change in HF Position
VIAV 23 215214 2
NNI 9 51977 -6
MLHR 16 104315 -4
SOHU 16 497731 -2

As you can see these stocks had an average of 16 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $217 million. That figure was $23 million in TREX’s case. Viavi Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:VIAV) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Nelnet, Inc. (NYSE:NNI) is the least popular one with only 9 bullish hedge fund positions. Trex Company Inc (NYSE:TREX) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard VIAV might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None