With the first-quarter round of 13F filings behind us it is time to take a look at the stocks in which some of the best money managers in the world preferred to invest or sell heading into the second quarter of 2021. One of these stocks was F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX).
Is F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX) the right investment to pursue these days? The smart money was becoming hopeful. The number of bullish hedge fund bets inched up by 1 lately. F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX) was in 4 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 9. Our calculations also showed that FSTX isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings). There were 3 hedge funds in our database with FSTX positions at the end of the fourth quarter.
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Oleg Nodelman of EcoR1 Capital
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Do Hedge Funds Think FSTX Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
At the end of the first quarter, a total of 4 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 33% from the fourth quarter of 2020. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in FSTX over the last 23 quarters. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies has the largest position in F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX), worth close to $1.5 million, amounting to less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Steve Cohen of Point72 Asset Management, with a $0.8 million position; less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Remaining professional money managers that hold long positions contain Oleg Nodelman’s EcoR1 Capital, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group and . In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position EcoR1 Capital allocated the biggest weight to F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX), around 0.02% of its 13F portfolio. Point72 Asset Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 0.0038 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to FSTX.
As one would reasonably expect, key money managers have been driving this bullishness. Point72 Asset Management, managed by Steve Cohen, initiated the biggest position in F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX). Point72 Asset Management had $0.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Oleg Nodelman’s EcoR1 Capital also initiated a $0.5 million position during the quarter. The only other fund with a new position in the stock is Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.
Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX) but similarly valued. These stocks are Reed’s, Inc. (NYSE:REED), TransAct Technologies Incorporated (NASDAQ:TACT), American River Bankshares (NASDAQ:AMRB), Corenergy Infrastructure Trust Inc (NYSE:CORR), Lumos Pharma, Inc. (NASDAQ:LUMO), OpGen, Inc. (NASDAQ:OPGN), and CLPS Incorporation (NASDAQ:CLPS). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to FSTX’s market cap.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| REED | 4 | 6108 | 0 |
| TACT | 7 | 17078 | 0 |
| AMRB | 1 | 230 | 0 |
| CORR | 6 | 5351 | -4 |
| LUMO | 4 | 17428 | -5 |
| OPGN | 3 | 339 | 2 |
| CLPS | 2 | 321 | -1 |
| Average | 3.9 | 6694 | -1.1 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 3.9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $7 million. That figure was $3 million in FSTX’s case. TransAct Technologies Incorporated (NASDAQ:TACT) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand American River Bankshares (NASDAQ:AMRB) is the least popular one with only 1 bullish hedge fund positions. F-star Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSTX) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for FSTX is 44.3. 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. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. Our calculations showed that top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 17.2% in 2021 through June 11th and beat the market again by 3.3 percentage points. Unfortunately FSTX wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on FSTX were disappointed as the stock returned -33.6% since the end of March (through 6/11) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as many of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.