Is Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (CLDX) a Good Stock To Buy?

Legendary investors such as Leon Cooperman and Seth Klarman earn enormous amounts of money for themselves and their investors by doing in-depth research on small-cap stocks that big brokerage houses don’t publish. Small cap stocks -especially when they are screened well- can generate substantial outperformance versus a boring index fund. That’s why we analyze the activity of those successful funds in these small-cap stocks. In the following paragraphs, we will analyze Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLDX) from the perspective of those successful funds.

Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLDX) investors should pay attention to a decrease in support from the world’s most successful money managers of late. At the end of September, 10 funds from our database held shares of the company. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as On Deck Capital Inc (NYSE:ONDK), Green Brick Partners Inc (NASDAQ:GRBK), and Dynavax Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ:DVAX) to gather more data points.

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.

With all of this in mind, we’re going to take a look at the recent action surrounding Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLDX).

What have hedge funds been doing with Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLDX)?

At the end of September, 10 funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on Celldex, down by two funds from the end of the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in CLDX over the last 5 quarters. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world has the most valuable position in Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLDX), worth close to $5.1 million, amounting to less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is D E Shaw, led by D. E. Shaw, which holds a $4.5 million position; less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other peers that hold long positions consist of Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and Peter Muller’s PDT Partners. 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.

Now that we’ve mentioned the most bullish investors, let’s also take a look at some funds that cut their entire stakes in the stock during the third quarter. Interestingly, First Eagle Investment Management cut the biggest position of all the investors monitored by Insider Monkey, worth an estimated $2 million in stock, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $0.5 million worth of shares.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLDX) but similarly valued. We will take a look at On Deck Capital Inc (NYSE:ONDK), Green Brick Partners Inc (NASDAQ:GRBK), Dynavax Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ:DVAX), and BioTime, Inc. (NYSEAMEX:BTX). This group of stocks’ market values match CLDX’s market value.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 12 investors with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $147 million. That figure was just $20 million in CLDX’s case. Dynavax Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ:DVAX) is the most popular stock in this table with 22 funds holding shares. On the other hand BioTime, Inc. (NYSEAMEX:BTX) is the least popular one with only seven bullish hedge fund positions. Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLDX) 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, Dynavax Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ:DVAX) might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: none