Should You Avoid Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. (TAST)?

Hedge fund managers like David Einhorn, Dan Loeb, or Carl Icahn became billionaires through reaping large profits for their investors, which is why piggybacking their stock picks may provide us with significant returns as well. Many hedge funds, like Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, are pretty secretive, but we can still get some insights by analyzing their quarterly 13F filings. One of the most fertile grounds for large abnormal returns is hedge funds’ most popular small-cap picks, which are not so widely followed and often trade at a discount to their intrinsic value. In this article we will check out hedge fund activity in another small-cap stock: Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TAST) .

Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TAST) has seen a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money recently. TAST was in 20 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 21 hedge funds in our database with TAST positions at the end of the previous quarter. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Myers Industries, Inc. (NYSE:MYE), Geron Corporation (NASDAQ:GERN), and Kimball International Inc (NASDAQ:KBAL) to gather more data points.

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.

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How are hedge funds trading Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TAST)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 20 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a decline of 5% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 22 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in TAST heading into this year. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of notable hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Jeffrey Bronchick’s Cove Street Capital has the biggest position in Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TAST), worth close to $30.9 million, amounting to 3.3% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Gregg J. Powers of Private Capital Management, with a $17.4 million position; the fund has 2.6% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining peers that hold long positions encompass Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, Remy Trafelet’s Trafelet Capital and Scott Wallace’s Wallace 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.