Hedge Funds Are Selling The York Water Company (YORW)

In this article we will take a look at whether hedge funds think The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW) is a good investment right now. We check hedge fund and billionaire investor sentiment before delving into hours of research. Hedge funds spend millions of dollars on Ivy League graduates, unconventional data sources, expert networks, and get tips from investment bankers and industry insiders. Sure they sometimes fail miserably, but their consensus stock picks historically outperformed the market after adjusting for known risk factors.

Is The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW) ready to rally soon? The smart money was in a bearish mood. The number of long hedge fund positions fell by 2 lately. The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW) was in 4 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 11. Our calculations also showed that YORW isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).

To most investors, hedge funds are seen as unimportant, outdated investment tools of the past. While there are over 8000 funds trading at present, Our researchers choose to focus on the moguls of this club, approximately 850 funds. These money managers orchestrate bulk of the hedge fund industry’s total capital, and by observing their first-class equity investments, Insider Monkey has found many investment strategies that have historically outperformed Mr. Market. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy outstripped the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points per year since its inception in March 2017. 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, an activist hedge fund wants to buy this $28 biotech stock for $50. So, we recommended a long position to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. 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 let’s go over the fresh hedge fund action regarding The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW).

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

At first quarter’s end, a total of 4 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of -33% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards YORW over the last 23 quarters. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Renaissance Technologies has the biggest position in The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW), worth close to $9 million, comprising less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. On Renaissance Technologies’s heels is Mario Gabelli of GAMCO Investors, with a $2.1 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining peers with similar optimism contain John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and . In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position 0 allocated the biggest weight to The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW), around 0.02% of its 13F portfolio. 0 is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.01 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to YORW.

Due to the fact that The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW) has faced declining sentiment from the smart money, we can see that there was a specific group of money managers that slashed their full holdings in the first quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Israel Englander’s Millennium Management sold off the largest stake of all the hedgies followed by Insider Monkey, comprising an estimated $0.3 million in stock, and Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $0.2 million worth. These transactions are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds in the first quarter.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW). We will take a look at Sinovac Biotech Ltd. (NASDAQ:SVA), Ferroglobe PLC (NASDAQ:GSM), Fossil Group Inc (NASDAQ:FOSL), Napco Security Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:NSSC), MeiraGTx Holdings plc (NASDAQ:MGTX), Arch Resources, Inc. (NYSE:ARCH), and FutureFuel Corp. (NYSE:FF). This group of stocks’ market valuations match YORW’s market valuation.

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As you can see these stocks had an average of 12.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $109 million. That figure was $12 million in YORW’s case. Arch Resources, Inc. (NYSE:ARCH) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Sinovac Biotech Ltd. (NASDAQ:SVA) is the least popular one with only 3 bullish hedge fund positions. The York Water Company (NASDAQ:YORW) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for YORW is 16.2. 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 17.2% in 2021 through June 11th and beat the market by 3.3 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on YORW, though not to the same extent, as the stock returned 7.1% since the end of Q1 (through June 11th) and outperformed the market.

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