Is Nutrien Ltd. (NTR) Going to Burn These Hedge Funds?
Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and successful value investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds' and successful investors' positions as of the end of the fourth quarter. You can find articles about an individual hedge fund's trades on numerous financial news websites. However, in this article we will take a look at their collective moves over the last 5 years and analyze what the smart money thinks of Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR) based on that data.
Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR) was in 25 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. The all time high for this statistic is 35. NTR has experienced a decrease in activity from the world's largest hedge funds of late. There were 26 hedge funds in our database with NTR holdings at the end of September. Our calculations also showed that NTR isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q4 rankings).
Robert Atchinson of Adage Capital Management
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Do Hedge Funds Think NTR Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
At Q4's end, a total of 25 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -4% from the previous quarter. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards NTR over the last 22 quarters. With hedge funds' positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were adding to their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).
The largest stake in Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR) was held by Arrowstreet Capital, which reported holding $491 million worth of stock at the end of December. It was followed by Adage Capital Management with a $67.4 million position. Other investors bullish on the company included Galibier Capital Management, Balyasny Asset Management, and Moerus Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Moerus Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR), around 14.23% of its 13F portfolio. Galibier Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 11.4 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to NTR.
Judging by the fact that Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR) has faced falling interest from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, logic holds that there lies a certain "tier" of fund managers that decided to sell off their positions entirely heading into Q1. At the top of the heap, William Harnisch's Peconic Partners LLC dropped the biggest stake of the "upper crust" of funds followed by Insider Monkey, comprising about $16.7 million in stock. Renaissance Technologies, also sold off its stock, about $9.2 million worth. These transactions are interesting, as total hedge fund interest fell by 1 funds heading into Q1.
Let's also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR). We will take a look at Willis Towers Watson Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:WLTW), Mettler-Toledo International Inc. (NYSE:MTD), Sirius XM Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:SIRI), AutoZone, Inc. (NYSE:AZO), Welltower Inc. (NYSE:WELL), Waste Connections, Inc. (NYSE:WCN), and Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE:MPC). This group of stocks' market caps are similar to NTR's market cap.
[table] Ticker, No of HFs with positions, Total Value of HF Positions (x1000), Change in HF Position WLTW,58,3245691,7 MTD,29,850200,-1 SIRI,32,670253,-5 AZO,44,1445833,-9 WELL,26,538410,1 WCN,35,626810,3 MPC,43,1883612,-13 Average,38.1,1322973,-2.4 [/table]
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 38.1 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1323 million. That figure was $755 million in NTR's case. Willis Towers Watson Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:WLTW) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Welltower Inc. (NYSE:WELL) is the least popular one with only 26 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR) is even less popular than WELL. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for NTR is 25.4. 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. Hedge funds clearly dropped the ball on NTR as the stock delivered strong returns, though hedge funds' consensus picks still generated respectable returns. Our calculations showed that top 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 81.2% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 26 percentage points. These stocks gained 12.3% in 2021 through April 19th and still beat the market by 0.9 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on NTR as the stock returned 13% since Q4 (through April 19th) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
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