Published on 5 Oct 2021 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance
Hedge Funds Are Snapping Up Burlington Stores Inc (BURL)
In this article we are going to use hedge fund sentiment as a tool and determine whether Burlington Stores Inc (NYSE:BURL) is a good investment right now. We like to analyze hedge fund sentiment before conducting days of in-depth research. We do so because hedge funds and other elite investors have numerous Ivy League graduates, expert network advisers, and supply chain tipsters working or consulting for them. There is not a shortage of news stories covering failed hedge fund investments and it is a fact that hedge funds' picks don't beat the market 100% of the time, but their consensus picks have historically done very well and have outperformed the market after adjusting for risk.
Is Burlington Stores Inc (NYSE:BURL) a buy, sell, or hold? Investors who are in the know were becoming hopeful. The number of bullish hedge fund positions moved up by 11 lately. Burlington Stores Inc (NYSE:BURL) was in 43 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of June. The all time high for this statistic was previously 40. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. Our calculations also showed that BURL isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings). There were 32 hedge funds in our database with BURL positions at the end of the first quarter.
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.