Published on 4 Oct 2021 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance

Do Hedge Funds Love Lakeland Financial Corporation (LKFN)?

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 Lakeland Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:LKFN).

Is Lakeland Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:LKFN) the right pick for your portfolio? Money managers were getting more optimistic. The number of long hedge fund positions moved up by 1 in recent months. Lakeland Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:LKFN) was in 10 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 12. Our calculations also showed that LKFN isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings). There were 9 hedge funds in our database with LKFN positions at the end of the first quarter.

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.