Is Century Bancorp, Inc. (CNBKA) A Good Stock To Buy?

Many prominent investors, including Warren Buffett, David Tepper and Stan Druckenmiller, have been cautious regarding the current bull market and missed out as the stock market reached another high in recent weeks. On the other hand, technology hedge funds weren’t timid and registered double digit market beating gains. Financials, energy and industrial stocks aren’t doing great but many of the stocks that delivered strong returns since March are still going very strong and hedge funds actually increased their positions in these stocks. In this article we will find out how hedge fund sentiment to Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA) changed recently.

Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA) was in 4 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. The all time high for this statistics is 5. CNBKA has experienced an increase in enthusiasm from smart money recently. There were 3 hedge funds in our database with CNBKA holdings at the end of June. Our calculations also showed that CNBKA 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.

If you’d ask most market participants, hedge funds are perceived as worthless, old financial tools of years past. While there are more than 8000 funds trading today, Our experts hone in on the upper echelon of this club, about 850 funds. These money managers direct bulk of the smart money’s total capital, and by keeping an eye on their first-class picks, Insider Monkey has revealed several investment strategies that have historically outstripped the S&P 500 index. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy exceeded the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points a year since its inception in March 2017. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 13% since February 2017 (through November 17th) even though the market was up 65% during the same period. We just shared a list of 6 short targets in our latest quarterly update .

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 10 most profitable companies in the world 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. Now we’re going to analyze the recent hedge fund action surrounding Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA).

Hedge fund activity in Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA)

At Q3’s end, a total of 4 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 33% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards CNBKA over the last 21 quarters. So, let’s find out 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,  Renaissance Technologies has the number one position in Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA), worth close to $11.7 million, amounting to less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is David P. Cohen of Minerva Advisors, with a $1.8 million position; the fund has 1.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other professional money managers with similar optimism comprise David Harding’s Winton Capital Management, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and . In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Minerva Advisors allocated the biggest weight to Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA), around 1.22% of its 13F portfolio. Winton Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.03 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to CNBKA.

As aggregate interest increased, some big names were breaking ground themselves. Millennium Management, managed by Israel Englander, assembled the biggest position in Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA). Millennium Management had $0.2 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter.

Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Teekay Tankers Ltd. (NYSE:TNK), Par Pacific Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PARR), IDEAYA Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDYA), Nam Tai Property Inc (NYSE:NTP), Ovid Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ:OVID), NI Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:NODK), and Caleres Inc (NYSE:CAL). All of these stocks’ market caps resemble CNBKA’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 11.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $39 million. That figure was $15 million in CNBKA’s case. Caleres Inc (NYSE:CAL) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Nam Tai Property Inc (NYSE:NTP) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Century Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNBKA) is even less popular than NTP. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for CNBKA is 30. 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. Hedge funds clearly dropped the ball on CNBKA as the stock delivered strong returns, though hedge funds’ consensus picks still generated respectable returns. 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 30.7% in 2020 through November 27th and still beat the market by 16.1 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on CNBKA as the stock returned 16.7% since Q3 (through November 27th) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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