Is PAC Stock A Buy Here?

The financial regulations require hedge funds and wealthy investors that exceeded the $100 million holdings threshold to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings to a certain extent level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings disclosed the funds’ positions on March 31st. We at Insider Monkey have made an extensive database of more than 866 of those established hedge funds and famous value investors’ filings. In this article, we analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC) based on those filings.

Is PAC stock a buy? Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC) has seen an increase in enthusiasm from smart money of late. Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico (NYSE:PAC) was in 5 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 8. Our calculations also showed that PAC isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).

Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Hedge funds have more than $3.5 trillion in assets under management, so you can’t expect their entire portfolios to beat the market by large margins. Our research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). So you can still find a lot of gems by following hedge funds’ moves today.

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, an activist hedge fund owns nearly 40% of this $23 biotech stock and is trying to buy the rest for around $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. Keeping this in mind we’re going to take a look at the new hedge fund action surrounding Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC).

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

At the end of the first quarter, a total of 5 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 25% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 5 hedge funds with a bullish position in PAC a year ago. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

The largest stake in Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC) was held by Renaissance Technologies, which reported holding $89.8 million worth of stock at the end of December. It was followed by Millennium Management with a $4.5 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Balyasny Asset Management, ExodusPoint Capital, and Engineers Gate Manager. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Renaissance Technologies allocated the biggest weight to Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC), around 0.11% of its 13F portfolio. Engineers Gate Manager is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 0.01 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to PAC.

As industrywide interest jumped, some big names were leading the bulls’ herd. Balyasny Asset Management, managed by Dmitry Balyasny, created the biggest position in Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC). Balyasny Asset Management had $0.3 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint Capital also initiated a $0.3 million position during the quarter. The only other fund with a brand new PAC position is Greg Eisner’s Engineers Gate Manager.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC). These stocks are Turning Point Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:TPTX), PennyMac Financial Services Inc (NYSE:PFSI), Silgan Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:SLGN), The Chemours Company (NYSE:CC), Clean Harbors Inc (NYSE:CLH), Select Medical Holdings Corporation (NYSE:SEM), and frontdoor, inc. (NASDAQ:FTDR). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to PAC’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 26.7 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $497 million. That figure was $95 million in PAC’s case. frontdoor, inc. (NASDAQ:FTDR) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Silgan Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:SLGN) is the least popular one with only 17 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, S.A.B. de C.V. Pacifico (NYSE:PAC) is even less popular than SLGN. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for PAC is 24.8. 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 dodged a bullet by taking a bearish stance towards PAC. Our calculations showed that the top 10 most popular hedge fund stocks returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 17.4% in 2021 through June 18th but managed to beat the market again by 6.1 percentage points. Unfortunately PAC wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was very bearish); PAC investors were disappointed as the stock returned 3.6% since the end of the first quarter (through 6/18) 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 most of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.

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