Here is What Hedge Funds Think About Novavax, Inc. (NVAX)

Hedge funds run by legendary names like Nelson Peltz and David Tepper make billions of dollars a year for themselves and their super-rich accredited investors (you’ve got to have a minimum of $1 million liquid to invest in a hedge fund) by spending enormous resources on analyzing and uncovering data about small-cap stocks that the big brokerage houses don’t follow. Small caps are where they can generate significant out-performance. These stocks have been on a tear since the end of June, outperforming large-cap index funds by more than 10 percentage points. That’s why we pay special attention to hedge fund activity in these stocks.

Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX) shareholders have witnessed a decrease in hedge fund sentiment of late. NVAX was in 13 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 16 hedge funds in our database with NVAX holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare NVAX to other stocks including Investment Technology Group (NYSE:ITG), American Renal Associates Holdings Inc (NYSE:ARA), and Atwood Oceanics, Inc. (NYSE:ATW) to get a better sense of its popularity.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

What have hedge funds been doing with Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 13 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a fall of 19% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards NVAX over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s examine which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management has the most valuable position in Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX), worth close to $11.5 million. On Millennium Management’s heels is Chuck Royce of Royce & Associates, with a $1.9 million position. Remaining peers with similar optimism include Kris Jenner, Gordon Bussard, Graham McPhail’s Rock Springs Capital Management, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.

Because Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX) has experienced a decline in interest from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, it’s easy to see that there exists a select few hedgies that decided to sell off their full holdings in the third quarter. Intriguingly, Julian Baker and Felix Baker’s Baker Bros. Advisors got rid of the biggest investment of the 700 funds monitored by Insider Monkey, valued at close to $17.3 million in stock, and Bihua Chen’s Cormorant Asset Management was right behind this move, as the fund dumped about $11.8 million worth of shares.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX). These stocks are Investment Technology Group (NYSE:ITG), American Renal Associates Holdings Inc (NYSE:ARA), Atwood Oceanics, Inc. (NYSE:ATW), and Keryx Biopharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:KERX). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to NVAX’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 11 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $152 million. That figure was $22 million in NVAX’s case. Atwood Oceanics, Inc. (NYSE:ATW) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand American Renal Associates Holdings Inc (NYSE:ARA) is the least popular one with only 7 bullish hedge fund positions. Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard ATW might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None