Is NVEE A Good Stock To Buy Now?

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. Insider Monkey finished processing 817 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of September 30th, 2020. In this article we are going to take a look at smart money sentiment towards NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE).

Is NVEE a good stock to buy now? The smart money was betting on the stock. The number of long hedge fund bets improved by 2 recently. NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE) was in 9 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. The all time high for this statistics is 15. Our calculations also showed that NVEE 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.

In the eyes of most investors, hedge funds are seen as unimportant, outdated financial tools of years past. While there are more than 8000 funds trading today, Our experts look at the leaders of this club, approximately 850 funds. It is estimated that this group of investors preside over bulk of the hedge fund industry’s total asset base, and by shadowing their first-class equity investments, Insider Monkey has come up with numerous investment strategies that have historically outstripped the S&P 500 index. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy outstripped the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points per 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 15 best blue chip stocks 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. 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 website. Keeping this in mind let’s take a peek at the recent hedge fund action regarding NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE).

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

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2020, a total of 9 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 29% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 15 hedge funds with a bullish position in NVEE 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.

Among these funds, Skylands Capital held the most valuable stake in NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE), which was worth $4.6 million at the end of the third quarter. On the second spot was Royce & Associates which amassed $3.8 million worth of shares. Cruiser Capital Advisors, Driehaus Capital, and Citadel Investment Group were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Cruiser Capital Advisors allocated the biggest weight to NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE), around 3.22% of its 13F portfolio. Skylands Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 0.77 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to NVEE.

As aggregate interest increased, some big names were leading the bulls’ herd. Driehaus Capital, managed by Richard Driehaus, created the biggest position in NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE). Driehaus Capital had $1 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group also made a $0.8 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The only other fund with a new position in the stock is Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint Capital.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE) but similarly valued. These stocks are S & T Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:STBA), Codexis, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDXS), Personalis, Inc. (NASDAQ:PSNL), Stratasys, Ltd. (NASDAQ:SSYS), Echo Global Logistics, Inc. (NASDAQ:ECHO), Great Western Bancorp Inc (NYSE:GWB), and PBF Energy Inc (NYSE:PBF). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to NVEE’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 12.7 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $56 million. That figure was $16 million in NVEE’s case. Stratasys, Ltd. (NASDAQ:SSYS) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand S & T Bancorp Inc (NASDAQ:STBA) is the least popular one with only 5 bullish hedge fund positions. NV5 Global Inc (NASDAQ:NVEE) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for NVEE is 43.2. 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. 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 32.9% in 2020 through December 8th and still beat the market by 16.2 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on NVEE as the stock returned 38.8% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/8) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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