Today’s Trending Stocks: Pioneer, Ariad, Hershey, and 2 More

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Crude futures are in the red today as sentiment around the commodity cools off. Meanwhile the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 are relatively flat as traders digest the latest earnings releases. Among the stocks in the news today are Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD), Hershey Co (NYSE:HSY), Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALXN), Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ARIA), and Goldcorp Inc. (USA) (NYSE:GG). Let’s take a closer look at why the five companies are in the spotlight and see how hedge funds are positioned in them.

At Insider Monkey, we track around 765 hedge funds and institutional investors. Through extensive backtests, we have determined that imitating some of the stocks that these investors are collectively bullish on, can help retail investors generate double digits of alpha per year. The key is to focus on the small-cap picks of these funds, which are usually less followed by the broader market and allow for larger price inefficiencies (see the details here).

Image Courtesy Pixabay

Image Courtesy Pixabay

Pioneer Losses Narrower Than Expected

Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD) shares are 3% in the green today after the company reported a loss of $0.22 per share on sales of $786 million for its second quarter. Analysts were expecting a loss of $0.36 per share on revenue around $805.5 million. Pioneer’s bottom-line results were ahead of estimates in part due to strong production numbers. Total production for the period rose by 5% year-over-year to 233,000 BOE per day, while oil production jumped by 10%. There could be more production growth ahead as management increased its 2016 capex budget by $100 million to $2.1 billion. Andreas Halvorsen‘s Viking Global owned more than 2.5 million shares of Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD) at the end of the first quarter.

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Strong Results at Hershey 

Hershey Co (NYSE:HSY) shares are up by 2% after the consumer staples company beat both top- and bottom-line estimates with its second quarter results. For the three months ended June 30, Hershey earned $0.85 per share on sales of $1.64 billion, beating the consensus estimates by $0.07 and $30 million respectively. Second quarter net sales increased by 3.7% year-over-year and the company updated its 2016 outlook to $4.24-to-$4.28 in adjusted EPS. 21 hedge funds in our system were long Hershey Co (NYSE:HSY) as of March 31.

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On the next page we’ll examine why Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Ariad Pharmaceuticals, and Goldcorp Inc are all trending this afternoon.


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