Hedge Funds Are Coming Back To T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (TROW)

Is T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW) a good place to invest some of your money right now? We can gain invaluable insight to help us answer that question by studying the investment trends of top investors, who employ world-class Ivy League graduates, who are given immense resources and industry contacts to put their financial expertise to work. The top picks of these firms have historically outperformed the market when we account for known risk factors, making them very valuable investment ideas.

T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW) has experienced an increase in hedge fund interest recently. T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW) was in 35 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 35. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. Our calculations also showed that TROW isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 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. Keeping this in mind we’re going to check out the key hedge fund action regarding T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW).

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

At the end of September, a total of 35 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 46% from one quarter earlier. By comparison, 34 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in TROW 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.

More specifically, AQR Capital Management was the largest shareholder of T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW), with a stake worth $144.5 million reported as of the end of September. Trailing AQR Capital Management was Arrowstreet Capital, which amassed a stake valued at $93.4 million. Markel Gayner Asset Management, Marshall Wace LLP, and Citadel Investment Group 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 Verdad Advisers allocated the biggest weight to T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW), around 1.35% of its 13F portfolio. Markel Gayner Asset Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.78 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to TROW.

As one would reasonably expect, some big names have jumped into T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW) headfirst. ExodusPoint Capital, managed by Michael Gelband, assembled the largest position in T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW). ExodusPoint Capital had $5.6 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp also made a $5.2 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Donald Sussman’s Paloma Partners, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and Donald Sussman’s Paloma Partners.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW) but similarly valued. These stocks are Kimberly Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB), L3Harris Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:LHX), Veeva Systems Inc (NYSE:VEEV), Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA (NYSE:BBVA), Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ:DDOG), Amphenol Corporation (NYSE:APH), and Lloyds Banking Group PLC (NYSE:LYG). All of these stocks’ market caps match TROW’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 29.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1242 million. That figure was $472 million in TROW’s case. Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ:DDOG) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Lloyds Banking Group PLC (NYSE:LYG) is the least popular one with only 8 bullish hedge fund positions. T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for TROW is 65. 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. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. 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 28.6% in 2021 through November 30th and beat the market again by 5.6 percentage points. Unfortunately TROW wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on TROW were disappointed as the stock returned 1.7% since the end of September (through 11/30) 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 many of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.

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

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