Hedge Funds Keep Selling Qiagen NV (QGEN)

We at Insider Monkey have gone over 867 13F filings that hedge funds and prominent investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of September 30th. In this article, we look at what those funds think of Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN) based on that data.

Is Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN) a buy right now? The smart money was in a pessimistic mood. The number of long hedge fund positions retreated by 1 in recent months. Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN) was in 21 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. The all time high for this statistic is 51. Our calculations also showed that QGEN isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings). There were 22 hedge funds in our database with QGEN positions at the end of the second quarter.

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 let’s take a peek at the key hedge fund action regarding Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN).

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

At the end of September, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -5% from the second quarter of 2021. By comparison, 29 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in QGEN a year ago. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

More specifically, Millennium Management was the largest shareholder of Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN), with a stake worth $167.3 million reported as of the end of September. Trailing Millennium Management was Balyasny Asset Management, which amassed a stake valued at $88.7 million. Arrowstreet Capital, Citadel Investment Group, and Farallon Capital were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Eversept Partners allocated the biggest weight to Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN), around 0.55% of its 13F portfolio. Farallon Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.39 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to QGEN.

Because Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN) has witnessed declining sentiment from hedge fund managers, logic holds that there exists a select few hedgies who were dropping their positions entirely in the third quarter. Intriguingly, Doug Silverman and Alexander Klabin’s Senator Investment Group cut the largest stake of all the hedgies tracked by Insider Monkey, comprising close to $24.2 million in stock. Howard Marks’s fund, Oaktree Capital Management, also said goodbye to its stock, about $8.5 million worth. These moves are important to note, as total hedge fund interest was cut by 1 funds in the third quarter.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN) but similarly valued. These stocks are Bruker Corporation (NASDAQ:BRKR), Godaddy Inc (NYSE:GDDY), FMC Corporation (NYSE:FMC), InterContinental Hotels Group PLC (NYSE:IHG), Trex Company, Inc. (NYSE:TREX), Procore Technologies Inc. (NYSE:PCOR), and Westlake Chemical Corporation (NYSE:WLK). This group of stocks’ market values are closest to QGEN’s market value.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 26.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $857 million. That figure was $599 million in QGEN’s case. Godaddy Inc (NYSE:GDDY) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand InterContinental Hotels Group PLC (NYSE:IHG) is the least popular one with only 9 bullish hedge fund positions. Qiagen NV (NYSE:QGEN) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for QGEN is 37.8. 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 29.6% in 2021 and still beat the market by 3.6 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on QGEN as the stock returned 7.5% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/31) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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