Why Are Investors Piling Into These Surging Stocks?

Although the Dow Jones Index and the S&P 500 are each close to flat for the day, shares of Valeant Pharmaceuticals Intl Inc (NYSE:VRX), Textura Corp (NYSE:TXTR), Cliffs Natural Resources Inc (NYSE:CLF), Sarepta Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:SRPT), and Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX) are all surging for various reasons. Let’s find out why investors are buying these stocks and also examine what the world’s greatest investors think of each equity.

At Insider Monkey, we track around 785 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).

According to a tweet from Wall Street Journal reporter Dave Benoit, five Directors on Valeant Pharmaceuticals Intl Inc (NYSE:VRX)‘s Board, including ValueAct’s Mason Morfit, might step down as soon as Sunday. The departing directors will be replaced by four new ones, many of whom have extensive pharmaceutical industry experience, in an effort to enhance Valeant’s credibility with investors. The potential Board shake up coincides with the company’s leadership change, as new CEO Joseph Papa will begin work in his new role beginning on Monday. Bill Ackman, who testified before Congress concerning Valeant and its drug pricing practices yesterday, is one of the top shareholders of Valeant Pharmaceuticals Intl Inc (NYSE:VRX) and is playing an active role to try and turn the company around. Shares of Valeant are 1.4% in the green in afternoon trading.

Textura Corp (NYSE:TXTR) shares are more than 30% higher after Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) announced that it would acquire the company for $26 in cash per share. The total transaction values Textura at $663 million, net of the company’s cash. Textura’s board of directors has approved the transaction and the deal is expected to close at some point in 2016. In other news, Textura also reported EPS in-line of estimates at $0.09 on sales of $24.66 million. The latter number beat analysts’ estimates by $0.41 million. Of the 786 active funds that we track, three had positions in Textura Corp (NYSE:TXTR) at the end of the fourth quarter.

On the next page we examine three more soaring stocks in the form of Cliffs Natural Resources, Sarepta Therapeutics, and Yandex NV.