Is AMOT A Good Stock To Buy Now?

While the market driven by short-term sentiment influenced by the accomodative interest rate environment in the US, virus news and stimulus talks, many smart money investors are starting to get cautious towards the current bull run since March and hedging or reducing many of their long positions. Some fund managers are betting on Dow hitting 30,000 to generate strong returns. However, as we know, big investors usually buy stocks with strong fundamentals that can deliver gains both in bull and bear markets, which is why we believe we can profit from imitating them. In this article, we are going to take a look at the smart money sentiment surrounding Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT).

Is AMOT a good stock to buy now? Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT) shareholders have witnessed a decrease in hedge fund sentiment recently. Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT) was in 12 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2020. The all time high for this statistics is 14. There were 13 hedge funds in our database with AMOT holdings at the end of June. Our calculations also showed that AMOT isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks).

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

In the 21st century investor’s toolkit there are a lot of gauges market participants use to grade publicly traded companies. A couple of the best gauges are hedge fund and insider trading interest. Our experts have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the top hedge fund managers can trounce their index-focused peers by a superb amount (see the details here).

At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 15 best blue chip stocks to pick the best large-cap stocks to buy. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our website. With all of this in mind we’re going to take a peek at the latest hedge fund action regarding Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT).

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

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 12 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of -8% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 12 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in AMOT a year ago. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Alexis Michas and John Bartholdson’s Juniper Investment Company has the number one position in Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT), worth close to $15.6 million, accounting for 16.5% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is ACK Asset Management, managed by Richard S. Meisenberg, which holds a $15.2 million position; the fund has 7.8% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism include Renaissance Technologies, Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners and Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Juniper Investment Company allocated the biggest weight to Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT), around 16.54% of its 13F portfolio. ACK Asset Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 7.8 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to AMOT.

Due to the fact that Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT) has experienced falling interest from hedge fund managers, we can see that there was a specific group of money managers that elected to cut their positions entirely heading into Q4. Intriguingly, Greg Eisner’s Engineers Gate Manager dropped the largest stake of all the hedgies tracked by Insider Monkey, totaling close to $0.3 million in stock, and Gavin Saitowitz and Cisco J. del Valle’s Springbok Capital was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $0 million worth. These bearish behaviors are intriguing to say the least, as total hedge fund interest dropped by 1 funds heading into Q4.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT). These stocks are Yunji Inc. (NASDAQ:YJ), TFF Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:TFFP), Waterstone Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:WSBF), Duluth Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:DLTH), Computer Programs & Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPSI), Barrett Business Services, Inc. (NASDAQ:BBSI), and Puma Biotechnology Inc (NASDAQ:PBYI). This group of stocks’ market values resemble AMOT’s market value.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 10.1 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $49 million. That figure was $50 million in AMOT’s case. Puma Biotechnology Inc (NASDAQ:PBYI) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Yunji Inc. (NASDAQ:YJ) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Allied Motion Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for AMOT is 60.5. 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 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.3% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10 percentage points. These stocks gained 32.9% in 2020 through December 8th and still beat the market by 16.2 percentage points. Hedge funds were also right about betting on AMOT as the stock returned 15.6% since the end of Q3 (through 12/8) and outperformed the market. Hedge funds were rewarded for their relative bullishness.

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