Should You Follow the Smart Money Back Into Seadrill Ltd (SDRL)?

Page 1 of 2

Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.

Seadrill Ltd (NYSE:SDRLhas seen an increase in hedge fund sentiment recently. 18 hedge funds in our system owned shares of SDRL on September 30. There were 17 hedge funds in our database with SDRL positions at the end of the June 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 Infinera Corp. (NASDAQ:INFN), Travelport Worldwide Ltd (NYSE:TVPT), and CBL & Associates Properties, Inc. (NYSE:CBL) to gather more data points.

Follow Seadrill Ltd (NYSE:SDRL)

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.

Oil Rig Platform Offshore Drilling Anadarko Ensco Transocean Diamond Offshore Seadrill DO ESV NE RIG SDRL APC

marchello74 / shutterstock.com

Hedge fund activity in Seadrill Ltd (NYSE:SDRL)

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a rise of 6% from the previous quarter.The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish positions in SDRL over the last 5 quarters, with the number of those positions generally trending down. So, let’s examine which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

HedgeFundSentimentChart

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Himanshu H. Shah’s Shah Capital Management holds the most valuable position in Seadrill Ltd (NYSE:SDRL). Shah Capital Management has a $7.3 million position in the stock, comprising 4.1% of its 13F portfolio. On Shah Capital Management’s heels is Robert Henry Lynch of Aristeia Capital, with a $7 million position. Other professional money managers with similar optimism encompass Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management and Philip Rosenstrach’s Pomelo Capital. We should note that two of these hedge funds (Shah Capital Management and Aristeia Capital) 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.

Page 1 of 2