Published on 13 Oct 2021 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance

Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (AMP): Hedge Fund Sentiment Unchanged

Although the masses and most of the financial media blame hedge funds for their exorbitant fee structure and disappointing performance, these investors have proved to have great stock picking abilities over the years (that's why their assets under management continue to swell). We believe hedge fund sentiment should serve as a crucial tool of an individual investor’s stock selection process, as it may offer great insights of how the brightest minds of the finance industry feel about specific stocks. After all, these people have access to smartest analysts and expensive data/information sources that individual investors can't match. So should one consider investing in Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP)? The smart money sentiment can provide an answer to this question.

Hedge fund interest in Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (NYSE:AMP) shares was flat at the end of last quarter. This is usually a negative indicator. Our calculations also showed that AMP isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings). At the end of this article we will also compare AMP to other stocks including EPAM Systems Inc (NYSE:EPAM), Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY), and Equity Residential (NYSE:EQR) to get a better sense of its popularity.

Why do we pay any attention at all to hedge fund sentiment? Our research has shown that a select group of hedge fund holdings outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by 79 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). That's why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.