Is Columbia Pipeline Partners LP (CPPL) Going to Burn These Hedge Funds?

Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.

Columbia Pipeline Partners LP (NYSE:CPPL) was in 9 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. CPPL investors should pay attention to a decrease in support from the world’s most successful money managers of late. There were 10 hedge funds in our database with CPPL positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare CPPL to other stocks including Fairmount Santrol Holdings Inc (NYSE:FMSA), Etsy Inc (NASDAQ:ETSY), and Oil States International, Inc. (NYSE:OIS) 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.

With all of this in mind, let’s take a glance at the fresh action surrounding Columbia Pipeline Partners LP (NYSE:CPPL).

What have hedge funds been doing with Columbia Pipeline Partners LP (NYSE:CPPL)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 9 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -10% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards CPPL over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s examine which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Alec Litowitz and Ross Laser of Magnetar Capital holds the number one position in Columbia Pipeline Partners LP (NYSE:CPPL). Magnetar Capital has a $45 million position in the stock. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is David Atterbury of Whetstone Capital Advisors which holds a $8.5 million position; 4% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Some other professional money managers that hold long positions encompass Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies which is one of the largest hedge funds in the world, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and GLG Partners. We should note that Whetstone Capital Advisors is 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 sold off their entire stakes in the stock during the third quarter. Intriguingly, Marc Lisker, Glenn Fuhrman and John Phelan’s MSDC Management sold off the largest position of all the investors watched by Insider Monkey, valued at an estimated $10.2 million in stock, and Richard Driehaus’s Driehaus Capital was right behind this move, as the fund said goodbye to about $1.4 million worth of shares.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Columbia Pipeline Partners LP (NYSE:CPPL). We will take a look at Fairmount Santrol Holdings Inc (NYSE:FMSA), Etsy Inc (NASDAQ:ETSY), Oil States International, Inc. (NYSE:OIS), and Federal-Mogul Corporation (NASDAQ:FDML). This group of stocks’ market caps match CPPL’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 18 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $498 million. That figure was $73 million in CPPL’s case. Fairmount Santrol Holdings Inc (NYSE:FMSA) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Federal-Mogul Corporation (NASDAQ:FDML) is the least popular one with only 8 bullish hedge fund positions. Columbia Pipeline Partners LP (NYSE:CPPL) 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 FMSA might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.

Disclosure: None