Hedge fund managers like David Einhorn, Dan Loeb, or Carl Icahn became billionaires through reaping large profits for their investors, which is why piggybacking their stock picks may provide us with significant returns as well. Many hedge funds, like Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, are pretty secretive, but we can still get some insights by analyzing their quarterly 13F filings. One of the most fertile grounds for large abnormal returns is hedge funds’ most popular small-cap picks, which are not so widely followed and often trade at a discount to their intrinsic value. In this article we will check out hedge fund activity in another small-cap stock: La-Z-Boy Incorporated (NYSE:LZB) .
La-Z-Boy Incorporated (NYSE:LZB) was in 18 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. LZB has experienced a decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds of late. There were 19 hedge funds in our database with LZB holdings at the end of the previous quarter. 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 Renasant Corp. (NASDAQ:RNST), SkyWest, Inc. (NASDAQ:SKYW), and Weis Markets, Inc. (NYSE:WMK) to gather more data points.
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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.
What does the smart money think about La-Z-Boy Incorporated (NYSE:LZB)?
At the end of the third quarter, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a fall of 5% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 18 hedge funds with a bullish position in LZB at the beginning of this year. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors has the largest position in La-Z-Boy Incorporated (NYSE:LZB), worth close to $11.8 million. On GAMCO Investors’s heels is Joel Greenblatt’s Gotham Asset Management holding a $9 million position. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions encompass Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw and Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management. 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.