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 December. At Insider Monkey, we follow nearly 750 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 The Madison Square Garden Company (NYSE:MSG), so let’s take a closer look at the sentiment that surrounds it in the current quarter.
Is The Madison Square Garden Company (NYSE:MSG) an outstanding investment right now? Hedge funds are buying. The number of long hedge fund bets advanced by 6 lately. Our calculations also showed that MSG isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
In the financial world there are a large number of tools investors have at their disposal to grade stocks. A pair of the most under-the-radar tools are hedge fund and insider trading indicators. We have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the best fund managers can outperform the broader indices by a solid amount. Insider Monkey's flagship best performing hedge funds strategy returned 20.7% year to date (through March 12th) and outperformed the market even though it draws its stock picks among small-cap stocks. This strategy also outperformed the market by 32 percentage points since its inception (see the details here). That's why we believe hedge fund sentiment is a useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.
We're going to check out the new hedge fund action surrounding The Madison Square Garden Company (NYSE:MSG).
How have hedgies been trading The Madison Square Garden Company (NYSE:MSG)?
Heading into the first quarter of 2019, a total of 46 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 15% from the second quarter of 2018. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in MSG over the last 14 quarters. With the smart money's sentiment swirling, there exists an "upper tier" of key hedge fund managers who were increasing their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Jim Davidson, Dave Roux and Glenn Hutchins's Silver Lake Partners has the number one position in The Madison Square Garden Company (NYSE:MSG), worth close to $499.5 million, accounting for 12.2% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Mario Gabelli of GAMCO Investors, with a $212.7 million position; 1.8% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other peers that hold long positions include Clifton S. Robbins's Blue Harbour Group, Ken Griffin's Citadel Investment Group and Robert Pohly's Samlyn Capital.