navlio
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
Hedge funds, particularly activist funds, do sometimes try to conceal the stocks they buy - usually by using derivatives which have different disclosure requirements. However, it is pretty rare for a hedge fund to be long and short the same stock unless they are doing it for tax reasons - this does not happen often. Going long a stock to create confusion about a short position (which is not disclosed) does not happen in the wild.
We believe that "knowing" in the aggregate just the stocks that managers are long has value. It is noteworthy that equity long/short strategies take a few quarters to materialize so using quarterly data is still valuable (hence we have excluded hedge funds that follow a short term statistical arbitrage strategy with many positions and very high turnover).
We ourselves used to track the number of "smart money" investors in biotech stocks like BLUE (bluebird bio) in Excel spreadsheets. The motivation for Navlio was to make this easier and more functional. Using BLUE as an example, the number of "smart money" investors increased from 2 to 10 before its stock price increased over 6x. We used Navlio to find other stocks like BLUE that hedge funds were buying and invested in some of those as well. If you want to actively buy stocks, this is a way to complement your research.