Published on 2 Jan 2022 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance
The Bancorp, Inc. (TBBK): Hedge Funds In Wait-and-See Mode
As we already know from media reports and hedge fund investor letters, hedge funds delivered their best returns in a decade. Most investors who decided to stick with hedge funds after a rough 2018 recouped their losses by the end of the fourth quarter of 2019. A significant number of hedge funds continued their strong performance in 2020 and 2021 as well. We get to see hedge funds' thoughts towards the market and individual stocks by aggregating their quarterly portfolio movements and reading their investor letters. In this article, we will particularly take a look at what hedge funds think about The Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:TBBK).
The Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:TBBK) shares haven't seen a lot of action during the second quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 18 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of March. Our calculations also showed that TBBK isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings). At the end of this article we will also compare TBBK to other stocks including iTeos Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:ITOS), Seabridge Gold, Inc. (NYSE:SA), and Playa Hotels & Resorts N.V. (NASDAQ:PLYA) to get a better sense of its popularity.
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 115 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.