Is Tantech Holdings Ltd. (TANH) A Good Stock To Buy?

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 866 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of March 31st, 2020. What do these smart investors think about Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH)?

Is TANH a good stock to buy? Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH) has experienced an increase in enthusiasm from smart money lately. Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH) was in 3 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 4. Our calculations also showed that TANH isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).

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

At the end of March, a total of 3 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 50% from the fourth quarter of 2020. By comparison, 2 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in TANH a year ago. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

More specifically, Renaissance Technologies was the largest shareholder of Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH), with a stake worth $0.5 million reported as of the end of March. Trailing Renaissance Technologies was Citadel Investment Group, which amassed a stake valued at $0.1 million. Two Sigma Advisors was 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 Renaissance Technologies allocated the biggest weight to Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH), around 0.0006% of its 13F portfolio. Two Sigma Advisors is also relatively very bullish on the stock, dishing out 0.0001 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to TANH.

With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, key money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. Two Sigma Advisors, managed by John Overdeck and David Siegel, assembled the most outsized position in Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH). Two Sigma Advisors had $0 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter.

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Dogness (International) Corporation (NASDAQ:DOGZ), Good Times Restaurants Inc. (NASDAQ:GTIM), UTStarcom Holdings Corp (NASDAQ:UTSI), Ambow Education Holding Ltd. (NYSE:AMBO), Hancock Jaffe Laboratories, Inc. (NASDAQ:HJLI), William Penn Bancorporation (NASDAQ:WMPN), and MDJM Ltd (NASDAQ:MDJH). This group of stocks’ market caps match TANH’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 2.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $2 million. That figure was $1 million in TANH’s case. Good Times Restaurants Inc. (NASDAQ:GTIM) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Dogness (International) Corporation (NASDAQ:DOGZ) is the least popular one with only 2 bullish hedge fund positions. Tantech Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:TANH) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for TANH is 78.5. 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. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. 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 beat the market again by 3.3 percentage points. Unfortunately TANH wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on TANH were disappointed as the stock returned -15.2% since the end of March (through 6/11) 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 many of these stocks already outperformed the market since 2019.

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