LinkedIn Corp (LNKD), IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI): Hedge Funds Are Betting On Yandex NV (YNDX)

Is Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX) a great investment today? The smart money is becoming more confident. The number of bullish hedge fund bets moved up by 4 recently.

If you’d ask most investors, hedge funds are viewed as unimportant, outdated investment vehicles of the past. While there are over 8000 funds trading at the moment, we at Insider Monkey look at the crème de la crème of this club, about 450 funds. It is widely believed that this group has its hands on the majority of all hedge funds’ total asset base, and by monitoring their top investments, we have come up with a number of investment strategies that have historically outstripped the broader indices. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outperformed the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per annum for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have outperformed the S&P 500 index by 24 percentage points in 7 months (check out a sample of our picks).

Just as important, optimistic insider trading sentiment is a second way to break down the investments you’re interested in. Obviously, there are lots of reasons for a bullish insider to downsize shares of his or her company, but only one, very clear reason why they would behave bullishly. Many empirical studies have demonstrated the useful potential of this method if investors know where to look (learn more here).

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a peek at the key action surrounding Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX).

Hedge fund activity in Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX)

At the end of the fourth quarter, a total of 18 of the hedge funds we track were bullish in this stock, a change of 29% from the third quarter. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings significantly.

When looking at the hedgies we track, Chase Coleman and Feroz Dewan’s Tiger Global Management LLC had the most valuable position in Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX), worth close to $329.6 million, accounting for 6.1% of its total 13F portfolio. On Tiger Global Management LLC’s heels is Rob Citrone of Discovery Capital Management, with a $78.5 million position; the fund has 1.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other hedge funds that are bullish include Dinakar Singh’s TPG-AXON Management LP, Christopher Lord’s Criterion Capital and Bain Capital’s Brookside Capital.

With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, key money managers were breaking ground themselves. Egerton Capital Limited, managed by John Armitage, created the largest position in Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX). Egerton Capital Limited had 45.3 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Scott Fine and Peter Richards’s Empire Capital Management also initiated a $9.3 million position during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Mark Kingdon’s Kingdon Capital, D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw, and Mike Vranos’s Ellington.

What have insiders been doing with Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX)?

Insider purchases made by high-level executives is most useful when the primary stock in question has experienced transactions within the past 180 days. Over the latest half-year time period, Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX) has seen zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

Let’s also review hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX). These stocks are LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD), IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), Groupon Inc (NASDAQ:GRPN), Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM), and Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ:TRIP). All of these stocks are in the internet information providers industry and their market caps resemble YNDX’s market cap.