Published on 8 Nov 2021 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance

Were Hedge Funds Right About Dumping IAC/InterActiveCorp (IAC)?

Most investors tend to think that hedge funds and other asset managers are worthless, as they cannot beat even simple index fund portfolios. In fact, most people expect hedge funds to compete with and outperform the bull market that we have witnessed in recent years. However, hedge funds are generally partially hedged and aim at delivering attractive risk-adjusted returns rather than following the ups and downs of equity markets hoping that they will outperform the broader market. Our research shows that certain hedge funds do have great stock picking skills (and we can identify these hedge funds in advance pretty accurately), so let’s take a glance at the smart money sentiment towards IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IAC).

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IAC) investors should be aware of a decrease in hedge fund interest in recent months. IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IAC) was in 50 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 72. There were 63 hedge funds in our database with IAC positions at the end of the first quarter. Our calculations also showed that IAC isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

In today’s marketplace there are dozens of methods investors employ to evaluate publicly traded companies. Some of the best methods are hedge fund and insider trading interest. Our researchers have shown that, historically, those who follow the best picks of the best investment managers can outclass the broader indices by a superb margin (see the details here). Also, our monthly newsletter's portfolio of long stock picks returned 185.4% since March 2017 (through August 2021) and beat the S&P 500 Index by more than 79 percentage points. You can download a sample issue of this newsletter on our website.