Is Vantiv Inc (NYSE:VNTV) the right pick for your portfolio? The best stock pickers are taking a bearish view. The number of long hedge fund bets went down by 2 lately.
In the eyes of most traders, hedge funds are viewed as worthless, old investment tools of years past. While there are over 8000 funds with their doors open at the moment, we at Insider Monkey look at the aristocrats of this group, around 450 funds. It is estimated that this group has its hands on the lion’s share of the hedge fund industry’s total capital, and by paying attention to their top equity investments, we have figured out a few investment strategies that have historically outpaced Mr. Market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outperformed the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points annually for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have topped the S&P 500 index by 23.3 percentage points in 8 months (see all of our picks from August).
Equally as integral, optimistic insider trading sentiment is a second way to parse down the investments you’re interested in. Obviously, there are plenty of motivations for a corporate insider to drop shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would initiate a purchase. Plenty of empirical studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this strategy if shareholders understand what to do (learn more here).
Keeping this in mind, it’s important to take a glance at the key action regarding Vantiv Inc (NYSE:VNTV).
How are hedge funds trading Vantiv Inc (NYSE:VNTV)?
Heading into Q2, a total of 18 of the hedge funds we track were bullish in this stock, a change of -10% from the first quarter. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes significantly.
Due to the fact that Vantiv Inc (NYSE:VNTV) has faced falling interest from the smart money, it’s easy to see that there exists a select few money managers who sold off their entire stakes at the end of the first quarter. Intriguingly, Robert Pohly’s Samlyn Capital said goodbye to the biggest stake of the “upper crust” of funds we monitor, totaling close to $17.7 million in stock.. Anand Parekh’s fund, Alyeska Investment Group, also cut its stock, about $16.1 million worth. These transactions are interesting, as total hedge fund interest was cut by 2 funds at the end of the first quarter.
How have insiders been trading Vantiv Inc (NYSE:VNTV)?
Insider buying is particularly usable when the company in question has experienced transactions within the past half-year. Over the last half-year time frame, Vantiv Inc (NYSE:VNTV) has seen zero unique insiders purchasing, and 27 insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
Let’s also review hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to Vantiv Inc (NYSE:VNTV). These stocks are athenahealth, Inc (NASDAQ:ATHN), Rollins, Inc. (NYSE:ROL), Global Payments Inc (NYSE:GPN), FleetCor Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:FLT), and Cintas Corporation (NASDAQ:CTAS). This group of stocks are in the business services industry and their market caps are similar to VNTV’s market cap.
