Hedge Funds Have Bought TiVo and More

While we wait for 13F filings to reveal a more complete picture of what hedge funds and other notable investors owned at the beginning of 2013 (very few of these filings have been released early), we can still get a picture of what fund managers are doing with 13D and 13G filings. These documents disclose when an institutional investor owns over 5% of the outstanding shares of a company, or when they make significant changes to such a position, and generally must be filed fairly quickly. As a result investors have a fairly recent buy recommendation from a fund, though of course it isn’t wise to blindly follow even the most successful investors as their performance depends on the entire set of trades they are making (including those in larger-cap stocks which don’t often appear in 13Ds and 13Gs). Here are five stocks hedge funds have bought recently:

Billionaire Ken Griffin and his team at Citadel Investment Group own 6.6 million shares of TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ:TIVO) according to Citadel’s most recent 13G filing. The 13F from the end of September reported a position of just over 1 million shares (see Griffin’s favorite stocks). TiVo remains unprofitable, at least if we strip out proceeds from litigation (some analysts argue that lawsuits will actually be a reliable source of income for the company, but we’d rather not depend on that line of thinking) and sell-side consensus is for negative profits in the forward fiscal year ending January 2014 as well. 12% of the outstanding shares are held short and we think it would be best to avoid the stock.

Colony Financial Inc (NYSE:CLNY), a real estate investment trust, can now count billionaire Steve Cohen and his SAC Capital Advisors among their major shareholders after SAC disclosed a position of 3.3 million shares (or just over 5% of the company). This is up from 340,000 shares at the end of the third quarter (check out Cohen’s stock picks). As a real estate investment trust, Colony distributes much of its income to shareholders and this results in a considerable dividend yield- almost 7% at this time. The company invests in commercial mortgage loans and other debt tied to real estate.

Activist investor Carl Icahn added 4 million shares of CVR Refining LP (NYSE:CVRR) at an average price of $25 per share, and now owns 124 million shares of the stock. VR became independently traded on January 17^th and was formerly a business unit of CVR Energy, Inc. (NYSE:CVI), a core Icahn holding. Research more of Icahn’s largest positions. CVR Refining, as implied, is a refiner of petroleum products. It is organized as a master limited partnership (MLP), a class of business that is increasing in popularity in the energy sector.