Should You Avoid Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (ALC)?

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Is it smart to be bullish on Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC)?

If you were to ask many of your fellow readers, hedge funds are perceived as useless, old financial tools of an era lost to time. Although there are In excess of 8,000 hedge funds with their doors open in present day, this site aim at the aristocrats of this club, close to 525 funds. It is assumed that this group controls the lion’s share of the smart money’s total assets, and by paying attention to their highest performing picks, we’ve figured out a few investment strategies that have historically outpaced the market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outstripped the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points a year 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 trumped the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (see all of our picks from August).

Just as useful, positive insider trading activity is a second way to analyze the marketplace. There are lots of stimuli for an executive to get rid of shares of his or her company, but only one, very obvious reason why they would initiate a purchase. Several empirical studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this tactic if you understand where to look (learn more here).

Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC)

Furthermore, we’re going to study the latest info surrounding Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC).

How are hedge funds trading Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC)?

Heading into Q3, a total of 6 of the hedge funds we track were bullish in this stock, a change of -40% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings considerably.

When using filings from the hedgies we track, Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management had the biggest position in Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC), worth close to $27.4 million, accounting for 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Kingstown Capital Management, managed by Michael Blitzer, which held a $15 million position; 2.5% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Other peers that are bullish include Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies, Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors and Paul Touradji’s TOURADJI CAPITAL MANAGEMENT, LP.

Judging by the fact that Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC) has witnessed declining interest from the smart money’s best and brightest, it’s safe to say that there is a sect of hedge funds that elected to cut their positions entirely last quarter. It’s worth mentioning that Gregory Bylinsky and Jefferson Gramm’s Bandera Partners cut the largest investment of the “upper crust” of funds we key on, totaling about $26.4 million in stock. Paul Glazer’s fund, Glazer Capital, also said goodbye to its stock, about $3.2 million worth. These transactions are interesting, as total hedge fund interest fell by 4 funds last quarter.

What do corporate executives and insiders think about Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC)?

Bullish insider trading is most useful when the company we’re looking at has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the last six-month time period, Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC) has seen zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

We’ll also review the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Assisted Living Concepts, Inc. (NYSE:ALC). These stocks are The Ensign Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ENSG), National HealthCare Corporation (NYSEAMEX:NHC), Kindred Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE:KND), Five Star Quality Care, Inc. (NYSE:FVE), and Skilled Healthcare Group, Inc. (NYSE:SKH). This group of stocks belong to the long-term care facilities industry and their market caps are closest to ALC’s market cap.

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