Is Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (FOXA) the Right Stock for Your Portfolio?

Our extensive research has shown that imitating the smart money can generate significant returns for retail investors, which is why we track more than 700 prominent money managers and analyze their quarterly 13F filings. The stocks that are heavily bought by hedge funds historically outperformed the market, though there is no shortage of high profile gigantic failures like hedge funds’ recent losses in Valeant. Let’s take a closer look at what the funds we track think about Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA) in this article.

Is Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA) ready to rally soon? Investors who are in the know are taking a bearish view, as the number of investors from our database long the stock inched down by one to 48. At the end of this article we will also compare FOXA to other stocks including CME Group Inc (NASDAQ:CME), CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI), and Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (USA) (NYSE:BAM) 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.

Now, we’re going to go over the new action regarding Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA).

What have hedge funds been doing with Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 48 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA), down by 2% from the previous quarter. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Donald Yacktman’s Yacktman Asset Management has the most valuable position in Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA), worth close to $1.15 billion, corresponding to 10% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund is Seth Klarman’s Baupost Group, with a $308.7 million position; the fund has 4.4% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining professional money managers with similar optimism comprise Boykin Curry’s Eagle Capital Management, David E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Because Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA) has faced a decline in interest from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, we can see that there were a few fund managers that elected to cut their entire stakes during the third quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Thomas Steyer’s Farallon Capital sold off the largest position of the “upper crust” of funds followed by Insider Monkey, valued at an estimated $137.6 million in stock. David Einhorn’s fund, Greenlight Capital, also sold off its position, worth about $129 million.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA). These stocks are CME Group Inc (NASDAQ:CME), CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI), Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (USA) (NYSE:BAM), and Monster Beverage Corp (NASDAQ:MNST). This group of stocks’ market caps are similar to FOXA’s market cap.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 40 funds with bullish positions at the end of September and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1.75 billion. That figure was $3.56 billion in FOXA’s case. CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand, Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (USA) (NYSE:BAM) is the least popular one with only 19 bullish hedge fund positions. Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (NASDAQ:FOXA) is not the most popular stock in this group, but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard CI might be a better candidate to consider a long position.