Hedge Funds Are Crazy About AMC Networks Inc (AMCX)

Legendary investors such as Leon Cooperman and Seth Klarman earn enormous amounts of money for themselves and their investors by doing in-depth research on small-cap stocks that big brokerage houses don’t publish. Small cap stocks -especially when they are screened well- can generate substantial outperformance versus a boring index fund. That’s why we analyze the activity of those successful funds in these small-cap stocks. In the following paragraphs, we analyze AMC Networks Inc (NASDAQ:AMCX) from the perspective of those successful funds.

AMC Networks Inc (NASDAQ:AMCX) investors should be aware of an increase in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds of late. AMCX was in 28 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 24 hedge funds in our database with AMCX positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare AMCX to other stocks including Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:BRCD), Copa Holdings, S.A. (NYSE:CPA), and PAREXEL International Corporation (NASDAQ:PRXL) 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.

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Now, we’re going to go over the key action surrounding AMC Networks Inc (NASDAQ:AMCX).

How have hedgies been trading AMC Networks Inc (NASDAQ:AMCX)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 28 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, up 17% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 26 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in AMCX heading into this year. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors has the largest position in AMC Networks Inc (NASDAQ:AMCX), worth close to $66 million, comprising 0.4% of its total 13F portfolio. On GAMCO Investors’s heels is Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies with a $41.9 million position; the fund has 0.07% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions consist of Thomas E. Claugus’s GMT Capital and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. 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.