Is Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NMM) A Good Stock To Buy Now?

The 800+ hedge funds and famous money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the first quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of March 31st. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund portfolios. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM).

Is Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM) a buy right now? The smart money was becoming hopeful. The number of bullish hedge fund positions inched up by 1 recently. Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM) was in 4 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 8. Our calculations also showed that NMM isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings). There were 3 hedge funds in our database with NMM holdings at the end of December.

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John Overdeck of Two Sigma

John Overdeck of Two Sigma Advisors

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, an activist hedge fund wants to buy this $28 biotech stock for $50. So, we recommended a long position to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 10 best battery stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. With all of this in mind we’re going to review the key hedge fund action surrounding Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM).

Do Hedge Funds Think NMM Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At the end of March, a total of 4 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 33% from the fourth quarter of 2020. On the other hand, there were a total of 5 hedge funds with a bullish position in NMM a year ago. 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, Citadel Investment Group, managed by Ken Griffin, holds the most valuable position in Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM). Citadel Investment Group has a $5.1 million call position in the stock, comprising less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio. On Citadel Investment Group’s heels is Citadel Investment Group, managed by Ken Griffin, which holds a $3.6 million position; less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Other hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions encompass John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Two Sigma Advisors allocated the biggest weight to Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM), around 0.0045% of its 13F portfolio. Citadel Investment Group is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 0.0013 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to NMM.

Now, key hedge funds were breaking ground themselves. Millennium Management, managed by Israel Englander, initiated the largest position in Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM). Millennium Management had $0.5 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM). We will take a look at Premier Financial Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:PFBI), Co-Diagnostics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CODX), Blue Ridge Bankshares, Inc. (NYSE:BRBS), Aqua Metals, Inc. (NASDAQ:AQMS), Oramed Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:ORMP), The Cato Corporation (NYSE:CATO), and Platinum Group Metals Limited (NYSE:PLG). This group of stocks’ market values are similar to NMM’s market value.

Ticker No of HFs with positions Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) Change in HF Position
PFBI 6 5673 3
CODX 4 2898 -1
BRBS 4 31909 1
AQMS 5 4210 2
ORMP 4 2374 -2
CATO 14 20138 2
PLG 6 5348 -1
Average 6.1 10364 0.6

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 6.1 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $10 million. That figure was $6 million in NMM’s case. The Cato Corporation (NYSE:CATO) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Co-Diagnostics, Inc. (NASDAQ:CODX) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Navios Maritime Partners L.P. (NYSE:NMM) is even less popular than CODX. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for NMM is 21. 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 NMM as the stock delivered strong returns, though hedge funds’ consensus picks still generated respectable returns. 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 still beat the market by 3.3 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on NMM as the stock returned 25.2% since Q1 (through June 11th) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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