Where Do Hedge Funds Stand On Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (ELS)?

Hedge Funds and other institutional investors have just completed filing their 13Fs with the Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing their equity portfolios as of the end of September. At Insider Monkey, we follow nearly 900 active hedge funds and notable investors and by analyzing their 13F filings, we can determine the stocks that they are collectively bullish on. One of their picks is Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS), so let’s take a closer look at the sentiment that surrounds it in the current quarter.

Hedge fund interest in Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS) shares was flat at the end of last quarter. This is usually a negative indicator. Our calculations also showed that ELS isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q3 rankings). At the end of this article we will also compare ELS to other stocks including RH (NYSE:RH), Evergy, Inc. (NYSE:EVRG), and Vedanta Ltd (NYSE:VEDL) to get a better sense of its popularity.

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, lithium prices have more than doubled over the past year, so we go through lists like the 10 best EV stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. With all of this in mind we’re going to take a peek at the latest hedge fund action encompassing Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS).

Do Hedge Funds Think ELS Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At the end of September, a total of 25 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 0% from the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in ELS over the last 25 quarters. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners has the largest position in Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS), worth close to $115.6 million, amounting to 0.4% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by John Khoury of Long Pond Capital, with a $83.3 million position; the fund has 3% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other professional money managers that hold long positions encompass Renaissance Technologies, Brad Dunkley and Blair Levinsky’s Waratah Capital Advisors and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Long Pond Capital allocated the biggest weight to Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS), around 3.05% of its 13F portfolio. Hill Winds Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 2.02 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to ELS.

Because Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS) has faced falling interest from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, it’s easy to see that there was a specific group of hedgies that slashed their entire stakes last quarter. Interestingly, Charles Fitzgerald’s V3 Capital sold off the largest investment of all the hedgies monitored by Insider Monkey, comprising an estimated $16.7 million in stock, and Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp was right behind this move, as the fund sold off about $1.1 million worth. These moves are intriguing to say the least, as aggregate hedge fund interest stayed the same (this is a bearish signal in our experience).

Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS) but similarly valued. These stocks are RH (NYSE:RH), Evergy, Inc. (NYSE:EVRG), Vedanta Ltd (NYSE:VEDL), SentinelOne, Inc. (NYSE:S), Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ:CGNX), BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. (NASDAQ:BMRN), and PTC Inc (NASDAQ:PTC). This group of stocks’ market caps resemble ELS’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 34.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1693 million. That figure was $462 million in ELS’s case. RH (NYSE:RH) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Vedanta Ltd (NYSE:VEDL) is the least popular one with only 8 bullish hedge fund positions. Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for ELS is 46.5. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. Our calculations showed that top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 31.1% in 2021 through December 9th and still beat the market by 5.1 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on ELS as the stock returned 8.7% since the end of the third quarter (through 12/9) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.