Polen Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Polen Global Growth” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 1.39% was delivered by the fund for the Q1 of 2021, trailing its MSCI All-Country World benchmark that delivered a 4.58% return for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Polen Global Growth Fund, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), and shared their insights on the company. Alphabet Inc. is a Mountain View, California-based holding company that currently has a $1.5 trillion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, GOOG delivered a 31.76% return, extending its 12-month gains to 68.10%. As of May 13, 2021, the stock closed at $2,261.97 per share.
Here is what Polen Global Growth Fund has to say about Alphabet Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“For our top contributors, each generated strong returns for different, but fundamentally based reasons, in our opinion. Alphabet saw renewed strength recently as advertisers generally resumed spending after a short pause during the pandemic.
Alphabet experienced some challenging quarters in 2020 as many companies paused their advertising spend. But, the business bounced back recently, spurring a strong recovery in the company’s share price. Even during such a challenging period, the company still compounded revenue at 14% in constant currency for 2020.
This is partly due to Alphabet’s multiple growth engines. For example, while its search business was negative one quarter and only grew by 6% during another, YouTube ads and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) grew at over 30% and 46% during the quarter, respectively. YouTube and GCP combined now contribute over 50% of the company’s growth, which we believe is a testament to a strong culture of innovation, a long-term mindset, and prudent capital allocation. With search bouncing back this most recent quarter–growing 17% –we believe that Alphabet continues to be well-positioned to durably compound earnings at or above 15% for many years to come. It remains one of our largest positions.”
Our calculations show that Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) ranks 6th in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Alphabet Inc. was in 157 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 150 funds in the third quarter. GOOG delivered a 9.77% return in the past 3 months.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 231.2% between 2015 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 126 percentage points. We know it sounds unbelievable. You have been dismissing our articles about top hedge fund stocks mostly because you were fed biased information by other media outlets about hedge funds’ poor performance. You could have doubled the size of your nest egg by investing in the top hedge fund stocks instead of dumb S&P 500 ETFs. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
