Should You Avoid Medtronic Inc. (MDT)?

Judging by the fact that Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT) has faced falling interest from hedge fund managers, we can see that there were a few money managers that elected to cut their full holdings in the third quarter. Intriguingly, ClearBridge dropped the biggest position of the “upper crust” of funds watched by Insider Monkey, comprising close to $105.4 million in stock, and Curtis Macnguyen’s Ivory Capital (Investment Mgmt) was right behind this move, as the fund dropped about $89.4 million worth of shares. These bearish behaviors are interesting, as aggregate hedge fund interest fell by 1 funds in the third quarter.

The final page of this article displays the hedge fund activity in other companies with market capitalizations close to the one of MDT.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT). These stocks are Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO), Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), and Unilever N.V. (ADR) (NYSE:UN). This group of stocks’ market valuations are similar to MDT’s market valuation.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 41 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $5.28 billion. That figure was $2.10 billion in MDT’s case. Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Unilever N.V. (ADR) (NYSE:UN) is the least popular one with only 12 bullish hedge fund positions. Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal, but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard CSCO might be a better candidate to consider a long position.

Disclosure: None