Heartland Advisors, an investment management firm, published its “Heartland Mid Cap Value Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 15.81% was delivered by the fund’s institutional class shares for the Q1 of 2021, outperforming its Russell Midcap® Value benchmark that delivered a 13.05% return for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Heartland Mid Cap Value Fund, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned AMERCO (NASDAQ: UHAL), and shared their insights on the company. AMERCO is a Reno, Nevada-based moving and storage operator that currently has a $12 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, UHAL delivered a 34.84% return, extending its 12-month gains to 110.91%. As of May 13, 2021, the stock closed at $612.13 per share.
Here is what Heartland Mid Cap Value Fund has to say about AMERCO in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“Following a muted start to the year, Industrials gained traction during the second half of the period and posted solid gains. The portfolio’s holdings in the space outperformed the benchmark average and contained a top contributor, Amerco (UHAL), a leading provider of moving equipment and storage facilities under the U-Haul brand.
Amerco continues to reap the benefits of accelerating equipment rentals and rising occupancy rates at its self-storage facilities. We believe equipment rental demand surged because COVID-19 caused urban dwellers to migrate out of densely populated business districts as work environments became more flexible. Additionally, Amerco has made progress in leasing newly developed storage units and has moderated spending on the buildout of additional facilities. The efforts resulted in a 6.5% jump in occupancy rates for the most recent quarter.
We expect Amerco will continue to benefit from migration trends that began in 2020. The company’s network is particularly well positioned, in our view, for one-way moves because of its comprehensive national footprint. Whether the current trend of migrating away from cities persists or people begin moving back to centralized locations, Amerco should benefit.”
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Our calculations show that AMERCO (NASDAQ: UHAL) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, AMERCO was in 21 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 19 funds in the third quarter. UHAL delivered a 22.31% 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.
