Here is What Hedge Funds Really Think About The TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX)

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. Insider Monkey finished processing more than 750 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of September 30th, 2019. What do these smart investors think about The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX)?

Is The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX) going to take off soon? Money managers are selling. The number of bullish hedge fund positions went down by 2 in recent months. Our calculations also showed that TJX isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 rankings, see the video below for Q2 rankings).

Video: Click the image to watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

If you’d ask most traders, hedge funds are assumed to be unimportant, old financial tools of yesteryear. While there are over 8000 funds trading at present, Our experts look at the moguls of this group, about 750 funds. These investment experts handle the lion’s share of the smart money’s total asset base, and by paying attention to their best investments, Insider Monkey has deciphered several investment strategies that have historically outrun the S&P 500 index. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy exceeded the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points per annum since its inception in May 2014. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 27.8% since February 2017 (through November 21st) even though the market was up more than 39% during the same period. We just shared a list of 7 short targets in our latest quarterly update .

Unlike the largest US hedge funds that are convinced Dow will soar past 40,000 or the world’s most bearish hedge fund that’s more convinced than ever that a crash is coming, our long-short investment strategy doesn’t rely on bull or bear markets to deliver double digit returns. We only rely on the best performing hedge funds‘ buy/sell signals. Let’s go over the recent hedge fund action regarding The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX).

What have hedge funds been doing with The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 48 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -4% from the second quarter of 2019. On the other hand, there were a total of 49 hedge funds with a bullish position in TJX a year ago. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

More specifically, Diamond Hill Capital was the largest shareholder of The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX), with a stake worth $380.3 million reported as of the end of September. Trailing Diamond Hill Capital was Arrowstreet Capital, which amassed a stake valued at $342.2 million. AQR Capital Management, D E Shaw, and BlueSpruce Investments 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 BlueSpruce Investments allocated the biggest weight to The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX), around 9.63% of its portfolio. Diamond Hill Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 2.02 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to TJX.

Since The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX) has faced bearish sentiment from the smart money, it’s safe to say that there lies a certain “tier” of hedgies that slashed their full holdings in the third quarter. Interestingly, Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management cut the biggest stake of all the hedgies followed by Insider Monkey, worth an estimated $80.2 million in stock, and Robert Pohly’s Samlyn Capital was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $61.5 million worth. These bearish behaviors are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds in the third quarter.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX) but similarly valued. These stocks are T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS), Banco Santander, S.A. (NYSE:SAN), Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc (NYSE:MUFG), and Banco Bradesco SA (NYSE:BBD). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to TJX’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 26.5 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $690 million. That figure was $1965 million in TJX’s case. T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc (NYSE:MUFG) is the least popular one with only 10 bullish hedge fund positions. The TJX Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TJX) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our calculations showed that top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 34.7% in 2019 through November 22nd and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 8.5 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on TJX, though not to the same extent, as the stock returned 6.6% during the fourth quarter (through 11/22) and outperformed the market as well.

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