If you were to ask many traders, hedge funds are viewed as useless, old investment tools of a forgotten age. Although there are more than 8,000 hedge funds trading today, this site focuses on the masters of this club, about 525 funds. Analysts calculate that this group controls the lion’s share of the hedge fund industry’s total capital, and by monitoring their highest quality stock picks, we’ve identified a number of investment strategies that have historically beaten the S&P 500. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outperformed the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per annum for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve started sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have outperformed the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (see all of our picks from August).
Equally as necessary, positive insider trading sentiment is another way to look at the marketplace. There are plenty of stimuli for an insider to drop shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would initiate a purchase. Many academic studies have demonstrated the impressive potential of this strategy if you know where to look (learn more here).
What’s more, we’re going to study the latest info for Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP).
How are hedge funds trading Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP)?
At Q2’s end, a total of 23 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of -8% from one quarter earlier. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings meaningfully.
Since Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP) has experienced bearish sentiment from the smart money’s best and brightest, we can see that there exists a select few money managers that slashed their positions entirely heading into Q2. Interestingly, Charles Davidson’s Wexford Capital cut the biggest position of the 450+ funds we key on, worth about $13.7 million in stock, and Patrik Brummer of Zenit Asset Management AB was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $6.6 million worth. These moves are important to note, as total hedge fund interest dropped by 2 funds heading into Q2.
Insider trading activity in Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP)
Insider buying made by high-level executives is at its handiest when the company in question has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the last 180-day time frame, Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP) has seen zero unique insiders buying, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
We’ll also examine the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP). These stocks are The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE:BX), Principal Financial Group Inc (NYSE:PFG), T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TROW), Invesco Ltd. (NYSE:IVZ), and Northern Trust Corporation (NASDAQ:NTRS). This group of stocks are in the asset management industry and their market caps are similar to AMP’s market cap.
