Hedge Funds Are Warming Up To Eastman Chemical Company (EMN)

A whopping number of 13F filings filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been processed by Insider Monkey so that individual investors can look at the overall hedge fund sentiment towards the stocks included in their watchlists. These freshly-submitted public filings disclose money managers’ equity positions as of the end of the three-month period that ended September 30th, so let’s proceed with the discussion of the hedge fund sentiment on Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN).

Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) has seen an increase in hedge fund interest recently. Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) was in 30 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 40. There were 27 hedge funds in our database with EMN positions at the end of the second quarter. Our calculations also showed that EMN 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 review the fresh hedge fund action surrounding Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN).

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

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 30 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 11% from the second quarter of 2021. By comparison, 27 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in EMN a year ago. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

The largest stake in Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) was held by Millennium Management, which reported holding $72.2 million worth of stock at the end of September. It was followed by AQR Capital Management with a $30.4 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Citadel Investment Group, Ancora Advisors, and Renaissance Technologies. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Atlantic Investment Management allocated the biggest weight to Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN), around 3.38% of its 13F portfolio. Jade Capital Advisors is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 1.18 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to EMN.

As aggregate interest increased, key money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. Renaissance Technologies, created the most outsized position in Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN). Renaissance Technologies had $20.1 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp also made a $4.7 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Robert Vincent McHugh’s Jade Capital Advisors, and Ryan Tolkin (CIO)’s Schonfeld Strategic Advisors.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) but similarly valued. These stocks are Elastic N.V. (NYSE:ESTC), Leidos Holdings Inc (NYSE:LDOS), The Mosaic Company (NYSE:MOS), Vail Resorts, Inc. (NYSE:MTN), Suzano S.A. (NYSE:SUZ), GameStop Corp. (NYSE:GME), and Howmet Aerospace Inc. (NYSE:HWM). This group of stocks’ market caps match EMN’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 30.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1196 million. That figure was $255 million in EMN’s case. Elastic N.V. (NYSE:ESTC) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Suzano S.A. (NYSE:SUZ) is the least popular one with only 6 bullish hedge fund positions. Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for EMN is 53.1. 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 negative signal and 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 surpassed the market again by 5.6 percentage points. Unfortunately EMN wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); EMN investors were disappointed as the stock returned 3.5% 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 most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2021.

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