Published on 10 Nov 2021 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance

Was The Smart Money Right About Kimberly Clark Corporation (KMB)?

After several tireless days we have finished crunching the numbers from nearly 900 13F filings issued by the elite hedge funds and other investment firms that we track at Insider Monkey, which disclosed those firms' equity portfolios as of June 30th. The results of that effort will be put on display in this article, as we share valuable insight into the smart money sentiment towards Kimberly Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB).

Is Kimberly Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB) an attractive stock to buy now? The best stock pickers were becoming hopeful. The number of bullish hedge fund bets moved up by 6 in recent months. Kimberly Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB) was in 37 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 46. Our calculations also showed that KMB isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

So, why do we pay attention to hedge fund sentiment before making any investment decisions? Our research has shown that hedge funds' small-cap stock picks managed to beat the market by double digits annually between 1999 and 2016, but the margin of outperformance has been declining in recent years. Nevertheless, we were still able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 79 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We have been able to outperform the passive index funds by tracking the moves of corporate insiders and hedge funds, and we believe small investors can benefit a lot from reading hedge fund investor letters and 13F filings.