Should I Buy General Mills, Inc. (GIS)?

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 873 13F filings submitted by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of June 30th, 2021. In this article we are going to take a look at smart money sentiment towards General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS).

General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) investors should be aware of an increase in support from the world’s most elite money managers in recent months. General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) was in 37 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 42. There were 31 hedge funds in our database with GIS positions at the end of the first quarter. Our calculations also showed that GIS isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

Why do we pay any attention at all to hedge fund sentiment? Our research has shown that a select group of hedge fund holdings outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by 79 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, we like undervalued, EBITDA-positive growth stocks, so we are checking out stock pitches like this emerging biotech stock. We go through lists like the 10 best EV stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. Now we’re going to take a look at the key hedge fund action encompassing General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS).

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

At second quarter’s end, a total of 37 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 19% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards GIS over the last 24 quarters. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

The largest stake in General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) was held by Renaissance Technologies, which reported holding $226.3 million worth of stock at the end of June. It was followed by Alkeon Capital Management with a $121.9 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Two Sigma Advisors, Citadel Investment Group, and AQR Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Half Sky Capital allocated the biggest weight to General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS), around 10.26% of its 13F portfolio. Wallace Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 1.99 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to GIS.

As one would reasonably expect, key money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. Millennium Management, managed by Israel Englander, assembled the most valuable position in General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS). Millennium Management had $20 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint Capital also initiated a $7.8 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new GIS positions are Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp, Andrew Weiss’s Weiss Asset Management, and Greg Eisner’s Engineers Gate Manager.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) but similarly valued. These stocks are Peloton Interactive, Inc. (NASDAQ:PTON), The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD), Motorola Solutions Inc (NYSE:MSI), Barrick Gold Corporation (NYSE:GOLD), Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp (NASDAQ:CTSH), AFLAC Incorporated (NYSE:AFL), and HP Inc. (NYSE:HPQ). All of these stocks’ market caps are closest to GIS’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 41.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $2013 million. That figure was $745 million in GIS’s case. Peloton Interactive, Inc. (NASDAQ:PTON) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) is the least popular one with only 25 bullish hedge fund positions. General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for GIS is 50.7. 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. 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 21.8% in 2021 through October 11th and still beat the market by 4.4 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on GIS as the stock returned 3% since the end of the second quarter (through 10/11) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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