Should You Buy Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc (MACK) After The 10% Surge?

What have hedge funds been doing with Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:MACK)?

Heading into Q2, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, unchanged from the previous quarter.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management had the biggest position in Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:MACK), worth close to $12 million, comprising 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Millennium Management, led by Israel Englander, holding a $10.6 million position. Englander’s fund has less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining hedgies with similar optimism include George McCabe’s Portolan Capital Management, John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors and Peter Kolchinsky’s RA Capital Management.

On the other side of the coin, hedge funds which have sold their shares in Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:MACK) include Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, which dropped the largest stake of the “upper crust” of funds tracked by Insider Monkey, totaling close to $2.9 million in stock. D. E. Shaw’s fund, D. E. Shaw, also bid farewell to its stock to the tune of about $0.8-million worth. These transactions are important to note, as aggregate hedge fund interest stayed the same. This is a bearish signal in our experience.

Also noteworthy to us is the fact that while shares of the company were up by about 4% in Q1 and the number of hedge funds with long positions stayed the same, the value of hedge funds’ aggregate investment in the company dropped to $35.14 from $37.57 million. This is also a slightly bearish signal in our experience.

Even though there is a positive signal in purchases made by one of the company’s directors, considering the slightly bearish hedge fund sentiment and the fact that we prefer to recommend stocks with strong insider and hedge fund sentiment signals, we don’t recommend a buy into Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:MACK) at the moment.

Disclosure: None