LionEye Capital Still Bullish on Dave’s of America Inc. (DAVE) and Further Raises Stake

According to a recently-amended 13D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Stephen Raneri’s LionEye Capital Management currently owns 1.24 million shares in Famous Dave’s of America Inc. (NASDAQ:DAVE), which represent 17.7% of the company’s common stock. The position was raised by around 195,600 shares compared to a previous filing.

LionEye Capital Management is a New York-based event-driven hedge fund co-founded by Stephen Raneri and Arthur Rosen in 2008. The investment firm primarily seeks out to invest in event-driven, risk arbitrage, and special situation opportunities. Moreover, LionEye Capital is not entirely concerned about the size of the companies it invests in and conducts both external and in-house research when looking for investment opportunities, and employs fundamental and technical analysis when evaluating potential investments. According to its most recent 13F filing, LionEye Capital manages an equity portfolio worth $2.46 billion, whereas its top ten holdings represent 74.26% of its entire portfolio.

Professional investors like Stephen Raneri spend considerable time and money conducting due diligence on each company they invest in, which makes them the perfect investors to emulate. However, we also know that the returns of hedge funds on the whole have not been good for several years, underperforming the market. We analyzed the historical stock picks of these investors and our research revealed that the small-cap picks of these funds performed far better than their large-cap ideas, which is where most of their money is invested and why their performances as a whole have been poor. Why pay fees to invest in both the best and worst ideas of a particular hedge fund when you can simply mimic the best ideas of the best fund managers on your own? A portfolio consisting of the 15 most popular small-cap stock picks among the funds we track has returned more than 123% and beaten the market by more than 66 percentage points since the end of August 2012, and by 4.6 percentage points in the first quarter of this year (see more details).

Famous Dave’s of America Inc. (NASDAQ:DAVE) is a chain of barbecue restaurants that currently owns 49 locations and franchises 135 additional units in 34 states all around the United States, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and Canada. The company’s stock has dropped by over 42% since the beginning of the year, as the company has been having a hard time living up to its growth potential.