Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW) shareholders have witnessed an increase in support from the world’s most elite money managers lately.
In the eyes of most traders, hedge funds are assumed to be underperforming, old financial tools of yesteryear. While there are greater than 8000 funds with their doors open today, we at Insider Monkey hone in on the upper echelon of this group, close to 450 funds. It is estimated that this group oversees most of the smart money’s total asset base, and by watching their top stock picks, we have figured out a few investment strategies that have historically beaten Mr. Market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outperformed the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points a year for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve started sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have topped the S&P 500 index by 24 percentage points in 7 months (explore the details and some picks here).
Just as important, positive insider trading activity is a second way to break down the marketplace. Just as you’d expect, there are many stimuli for a corporate insider to get rid of shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would behave bullishly. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this strategy if you understand what to do (learn more here).
Consequently, let’s take a peek at the key action encompassing Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW).
How have hedgies been trading Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW)?
At year’s end, a total of 10 of the hedge funds we track were bullish in this stock, a change of 25% from the third quarter. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings significantly.
When looking at the hedgies we track, Pershing Square, managed by Bill Ackman, holds the biggest position in Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW). Pershing Square has a $630.7 million position in the stock, comprising 6.9% of its 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Chase Coleman and Feroz Dewan of Tiger Global Management LLC, with a $118.4 million position; 2.2% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other peers that hold long positions include J Kevin Kenny Jr’s Emerging Sovereign Group, Robert Millard’s Realm Partners and Eliav Assouline and Marc Andersen’s Axial Capital.
As aggregate interest increased, key hedge funds were leading the bulls’ herd. Axial Capital, managed by Eliav Assouline and Marc Andersen, created the largest position in Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW). Axial Capital had 3.5 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates also made a $0.7 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new BKW investors: Whitney Tilson’s T2 Partners and Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies.
What have insiders been doing with Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW)?
Bullish insider trading is most useful when the primary stock in question has seen transactions within the past 180 days. Over the last half-year time frame, Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW) has seen zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
Let’s also review hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW). These stocks are Domino’s Pizza, Inc. (NYSE:DPZ), Dunkin Brands Group Inc (NASDAQ:DNKN), Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (NYSE:CMG), Tim Hortons Inc. (USA) (NYSE:THI), and Darden Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE:DRI). All of these stocks are in the restaurants industry and their market caps are similar to BKW’s market cap.
