Published on 10 Nov 2021 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance

Were Hedge Funds Right About Ascendis Pharma A/S (ASND)?

Although the masses and most of the financial media blame hedge funds for their exorbitant fee structure and disappointing performance, these investors have proved to have great stock picking abilities over the years (that's why their assets under management continue to swell). We believe hedge fund sentiment should serve as a crucial tool of an individual investor’s stock selection process, as it may offer great insights of how the brightest minds of the finance industry feel about specific stocks. After all, these people have access to smartest analysts and expensive data/information sources that individual investors can't match. So should one consider investing in Ascendis Pharma A/S (NASDAQ:ASND)? The smart money sentiment can provide an answer to this question.

Ascendis Pharma A/S (NASDAQ:ASND) was in 29 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of June. The all time high for this statistic is 38. ASND has seen an increase in hedge fund sentiment lately. There were 28 hedge funds in our database with ASND holdings at the end of March. Our calculations also showed that ASND isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings).

In the financial world there are a large number of tools investors have at their disposal to grade stocks. A pair of the most under-the-radar tools are hedge fund and insider trading indicators. We have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the best fund managers can outperform the broader indices by a solid amount. Insider Monkey's monthly stock picks returned 185.4% since March 2017 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 79 percentage points (see the details here). That's why we believe hedge fund sentiment is a useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.