Is Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (RIGL) Worthy of Your Portfolio?

The 700+ hedge funds and money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the third quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of September 30. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund positions. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RIGL).

Is Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RIGL) the right investment to pursue these days? Investors who are in the know seem to be taking an optimistic view. The number of bullish hedge fund bets revealed by investors from our database inched up by one to 20 during the third quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare RIGL to other stocks including MidWestOne Financial Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:MOFG), Liquidity Services, Inc. (NASDAQ:LQDT), and Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSII) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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.

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With all of this in mind, let’s take a gander at the key action regarding Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RIGL).

How have hedgies been trading Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RIGL)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 20 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in Rigel Pharmaceuticals, up by 5% from one quarter earlier. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in RIGL over the last five quarters. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Palo Alto Investors, led by William Leland Edwards, holds the largest position in Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RIGL). Palo Alto Investors has a $19 million position in the stock, comprising 1.1% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, which disclosed a $12.9 million position; less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Remaining members of the smart money with similar optimism contain Millennium Management (one of the biggest hedge funds in the world), D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, and Kris Jenner, Gordon Bussard, Graham McPhail’s Rock Springs 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.