How LeMaitre Vascular Inc (LMAT) Stacks Up Against Its Peers

It is already common knowledge that individual investors do not usually have the necessary resources and abilities to properly research an investment opportunity. As a result, most investors pick their illusory “winners” by making a superficial analysis and research that leads to poor performance on aggregate. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index returned 7.6% over the 12-month period ending November 21, while more than 51% of the constituents of the index underperformed the benchmark. Hence, a random stock picking process will most likely lead to disappointment. At the same time, the 30 most favored mid-cap stocks by the best performing hedge funds monitored by Insider Monkey generated a return of 18% over the same time span. Of course, hedge funds do make wrong bets on some occasions and these get disproportionately publicized on financial media, but piggybacking their moves can beat the broader market on average. That’s why we are going to go over recent hedge fund activity in LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT).

LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT) shareholders have witnessed an increase in support from the world’s most successful money managers in recent months. There were 7 hedge funds in our database with LMAT positions at the end of June, 4 fewer than there were at the end of September. At the end of this article we will also compare LMAT to other stocks including Culp, Inc. (NYSE:CFI), Spok Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:SPOK), and Cytokinetics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CYTK) 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 LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT)

At Q3’s end, a total of 11 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a 57% increase from the second quarter of 2016, which followed 2 quarters of declines. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in LMAT over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Richard Driehaus’ Driehaus Capital has the biggest position in LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT), worth close to $10.1 million. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Robert B. Gillam of McKinley Capital Management, with a $5.2 million position. Some other professional money managers that hold long positions include Millennium Management, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, and Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management. 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-micro-cap stocks.

As industry-wide interest jumped, key money managers have jumped into LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT) headfirst. Arrowstreet Capital, led by Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell, created the most outsized position in LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT). Arrowstreet Capital had $0.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw also made a $0.6 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and Neil Chriss’ Hutchin Hill Capital.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT). We will take a look at Culp, Inc. (NYSE:CFI), Spok Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:SPOK), Cytokinetics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CYTK), and Dynex Capital Inc (NYSE:DX). This group of stocks’ market caps match LMAT’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $39 million. That figure was $29 million in LMAT’s case. Cytokinetics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CYTK) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Spok Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:SPOK) is the least popular one with only 5 bullish hedge fund positions. LeMaitre Vascular Inc (NASDAQ:LMAT) 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 CYTK might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None