Hedge Funds Are Coming Back To W.P. Carey Inc. (WPC)

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 have processed the filings of the more than 866 world-class investment firms that we track and now have access to the collective wisdom contained in these filings, which are based on their March 31st holdings, data that is available nowhere else. Should you consider W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC) for your portfolio? We’ll look to this invaluable collective wisdom for the answer.

W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC) has experienced an increase in support from the world’s most elite money managers recently. W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC) was in 23 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 23. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. There were 18 hedge funds in our database with WPC positions at the end of the fourth quarter. Our calculations also showed that WPC isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).

To the average investor there are plenty of signals market participants use to evaluate publicly traded companies. Two of the less utilized signals are hedge fund and insider trading sentiment. Our experts have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the best investment managers can outperform the market by a healthy margin (see the details here). Also, our monthly newsletter’s portfolio of long stock picks returned 206.8% since March 2017 (through May 2021) and beat the S&P 500 Index by more than 115 percentage points. You can download a sample issue of this newsletter on our website .

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Chuck Schumer recently stated that marijuana legalization will be a Senate priority. So, we are checking out this under the radar stock that will benefit from this. We go through lists like the 10 best battery 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. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. Now we’re going to analyze the key hedge fund action surrounding W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC).

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

At the end of March, a total of 23 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 28% from the fourth quarter of 2020. On the other hand, there were a total of 22 hedge funds with a bullish position in WPC a year ago. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

Among these funds, Renaissance Technologies held the most valuable stake in W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC), which was worth $34.1 million at the end of the fourth quarter. On the second spot was D E Shaw which amassed $29.6 million worth of shares. Two Sigma Advisors, Millennium Management, and Tudor Investment Corp 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 0 allocated the biggest weight to W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC), around 0.64% of its 13F portfolio. 0 is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 0.62 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to WPC.

With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, specific money managers have jumped into W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC) headfirst. Renaissance Technologies, created the biggest position in W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC). Renaissance Technologies had $34.1 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp also made a $14.6 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new WPC investors: D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, J. Alan Reid, Jr.’s Forward Management, and Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint Capital.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC). These stocks are NortonLifeLock Inc. (NASDAQ:NLOK), Ceridian HCM Holding Inc. (NYSE:CDAY), Medical Properties Trust, Inc. (NYSE:MPW), Texas Pacific Land Corporation (NYSE:TPL), Sunrun Inc (NASDAQ:RUN), Canopy Growth Corporation (NASDAQ:CGC), and Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN). All of these stocks’ market caps resemble WPC’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 26.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1223 million. That figure was $163 million in WPC’s case. Sunrun Inc (NASDAQ:RUN) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Canopy Growth Corporation (NASDAQ:CGC) is the least popular one with only 12 bullish hedge fund positions. W.P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for WPC is 59. 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 23.8% in 2021 through July 16th and beat the market by 7.7 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on WPC, though not to the same extent, as the stock returned 13.6% since the end of Q1 (through July 16th) and outperformed the market.

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