This Company Just Scored A Major Five-Year Defense Contract

One of the most popular aerospace and defense stocks among the elite investment firms that we follow, Raytheon was in the portfolios of 37 hedge funds on June 30, who owned 3.10% of its outstanding shares as of that date, worth $906 million. While the overall ownership was still relatively low, those figures were a big step up from the 25 firms holding $669 million in shares on March 31, so top money managers were starting to like what they saw from Raytheon. Among them were several extremely bullish firms, including Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies.

In addition to hedge funds, analysts are also increasingly singing the praises of Raytheon Company (NYSE:RTN). UBS upgraded Raytheon to ‘Buy’ from ‘Hold’ this morning, raising its price target to $118 from $111, representing upside of greater than 10%. A week earlier, Bernstein upgraded it to ‘Outperform’ from ‘Market Perform’, with an even more bullish price target of $132. Raytheon is up by 0.81% in trading this morning and down by just over 1% year-to-date.

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