Published on 4 Oct 2021 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance
Should I Buy Amgen, Inc. (AMGN)?
Many prominent investors, including Warren Buffett, David Tepper and Stan Druckenmiller, have been cautious regarding the current bull market and missed out as the stock market reached another high in recent weeks. On the other hand, technology hedge funds weren't timid and registered double digit market beating gains. Financials, energy and industrial stocks initially suffered the most but many of these stocks delivered strong returns since November and hedge funds actually increased their positions in these stocks. In this article we will find out how hedge fund sentiment towards Amgen, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN) changed recently.
Amgen, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN) shareholders have witnessed an increase in hedge fund sentiment recently. Amgen, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN) was in 53 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 73. There were 47 hedge funds in our database with AMGN positions at the end of the first quarter. Our calculations also showed that AMGN isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).
Hedge funds' reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn't keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. 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 79 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that underperformed the market by 10 percentage points annually between 2006 and 2017. Interestingly the margin of underperformance of these stocks has been increasing in recent years. Investors who are long the market and short these stocks would have returned more than 27% annually between 2015 and 2017. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 in our quarterly newsletter.