Earlier this year, many hedge funds were holding a larger percentage of their assets in cash than at any other time in recent memory, as fears that the market was due for a correction abounded. This led to many small-cap stocks being hit hard, as hedge funds, which tend to be some of their staunchest backers, liquidated their holdings. Now however, hedge funds appear to be growing more confident and putting their money back into equities, which has led to small-cap stocks taking off, with the Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) having outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by more than 10 percentage points since the end of June. In this article, we’ll see how this large shift in hedge fund activity impacted Regency Centers Corp (NYSE:REG) .
Regency Centers Corp (NYSE:REG) shareholders have witnessed an increase in hedge fund sentiment in recent months. REG was in 11 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 6 hedge funds in our database with REG positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare REG to other stocks including ANSYS, Inc. (NASDAQ:ANSS), Plains GP Holdings LP (NYSE:PAGP), and Rite Aid Corporation (NYSE:RAD) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Regency Centers Corp
Follow Regency Centers Corp
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.
g0d4ather / shutterstock.com
Now, let’s take a look at the new action surrounding Regency Centers Corp (NYSE:REG).
Hedge fund activity in Regency Centers Corp (NYSE:REG)
At Q3’s end, a total of 11 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a jump of 83% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 7 hedge funds with a bullish position in REG at the beginning of this year. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Millennium Management, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, has the most valuable position in Regency Centers Corp (NYSE:REG), worth close to $94 million and accounting for 0.2% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, with a $20.9 million position; the fund has less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other peers with similar optimism encompass Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management, D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw and Matthew Tewksbury’s Stevens 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.
