What Do Hedge Funds Think of Apollo Education Group Inc (APOL)?

Investing in small cap stocks has historically been a way to outperform the market, as small cap companies typically grow faster on average than the blue chips. That outperformance comes with a price, however, as there are occasional periods of higher volatility. The time period between June 25 and the end of October was one of those periods, as the Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) has underperformed the larger S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by more than 14 percentage points. Given that the funds we track tend to have a disproportionate amount of their portfolios in smaller cap stocks, they have seen some volatility in their portfolios too. Actually their moves are potentially one of the factors that contributed to this volatility. In this article, we use our extensive database of hedge fund holdings to find out what the smart money thinks of Apollo Education Group Inc (NASDAQ:APOL).

Apollo Education Group Inc (NASDAQ:APOL) investors should be aware of a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money in recent months. At the end of this article we will also compare APOL to other stocks including Cott Corporation (USA) (NYSE:COT), Finisar Corporation (NASDAQ:FNSR), and TriNet Group Inc (NYSE:TNET) to get a better sense of its popularity.

With all of this in mind, we’re going to take a peek at the new action encompassing Apollo Education Group Inc (NASDAQ:APOL).

How are hedge funds trading Apollo Education Group Inc (NASDAQ:APOL)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 25 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -7% from one quarter earlier. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, First Pacific Advisors LLC, managed by Robert Rodriguez and Steven Romick, holds the number one position in Apollo Education Group Inc (NASDAQ:APOL). First Pacific Advisors LLC has a $84.3 million position in the stock, comprising 0.7% of its 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital, with a $76.2 million position; the fund has 0.4% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other peers that are bullish contain Joel Greenblatt’s Gotham Asset Management, Donald Yacktman’s Yacktman Asset Management and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.