How ConnectOne Bancorp Inc (CNOB) Stacks Up Against Its Peers

Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.

ConnectOne Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:CNOB) has seen a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money recently. CNOB was in 7 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 8 hedge funds in our database with CNOB holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare CNOB to other stocks including Ellington Financial LLC (NYSE:EFC), Par Pacific Holdings, Inc. (NYSEMKT:PARR), and MarineMax, Inc. (NYSE:HZO) 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.

Hedge fund activity in ConnectOne Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:CNOB)

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 7 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, down by 13% from the second quarter of 2016. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in CNOB over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, holds the number one position in ConnectOne Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:CNOB). Renaissance Technologies has a $14.2 million position in the stock. On Renaissance Technologies’s heels is William Black of Consector Capital, with a $3.1 million position; the fund has 6.7% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining professional money managers with similar optimism encompass Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. 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.

Due to the fact that ConnectOne Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:CNOB) has experienced a decline in interest from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, logic holds that there were a few fund managers that decided to sell off their entire stakes by the end of the third quarter. Interestingly, Anton Schutz’s Mendon Capital Advisors dropped the biggest stake of the 700 funds watched by Insider Monkey, comprising about $6 million in stock. Paul Magidson, Jonathan Cohen. And Ostrom Enders’s fund, Castine Capital Management, also said goodbye to its stock, about $3.5 million worth.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to ConnectOne Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:CNOB). We will take a look at Ellington Financial LLC (NYSE:EFC), Par Pacific Holdings, Inc. (NYSEMKT:PARR), MarineMax, Inc. (NYSE:HZO), and ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOR). This group of stocks’ market values are closest to CNOB’s market value.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 15 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $99 million. That figure was $20 million in CNOB’s case. ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOR) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Ellington Financial LLC (NYSE:EFC) is the least popular one with only 3 bullish hedge fund positions. ConnectOne Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:CNOB) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard SHOR might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None