Ariel Investments, a minority-owned investment company that focuses in small and mid-capitalized US based stocks, published its third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A positive return of 4.56% was recorded by the fund for the 3rd Quarter of 2020, ahead of its Russell 2500 Value benchmark that returned 3.54%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Ariel Investments in their Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that they were able to distinguish a value in BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ: BOKF) and initiated a position in the company. BOK Financial Corp. is a niche banking services provider that currently has a $5.586 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, BOKF delivered a huge 41.60% return and settled at $79.45 per share at the closing of January 14th.
Here is what Ariel Investments has to say about BOK Financial Corp. in their Investor Letter:
“In Ariel Fund, we initiated a position in niche banking services provider, BOK Financial Corporation (BOKF) during the quarter. BOKF provides commercial and consumer banking, investment and trust services, mortgage origination and servicing. We took advantage of weakness in share price following the company’s disclosure of a larger than expected loan loss provision driven by negative credit migration in the energy loan book. We believe BOKF’s balanced business model between banking (60% of revenues) and fee service businesses (40% of revenues) allows the company to serve more of their clients’ needs while reducing volatility in financial results. In our view, the low rate environment will prove to be less important for BOKF than the positive impact of its diversified business model, underwriting disciplines and the experienced management team led by Chairman and majority owner George Kaiser. “
Zadorozhnyi Viktor/Shutterstock.com
Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Etsy Inc (NASDAQ: BOKF) was in 21 hedge funds’ portfolio, almost making it to its all time high statistics of 22. BOK Financial Corp proved its worth by delivering a 16.36% return YTD.
As of September 2020, Ariel Investments had a 2.1 million share position in BOKF that amounted to $112 million. This made Ariel Investments as the top hedge fund that holds most of BOKF’s stake, followed by Diamond Hill Capital with $59 million worth of BOKF shares, and Arrowstreet Capital with $18 million. However, our calculations showed that BOK Financial Corporation (NASDAQ: BOKF) does not belong to the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 216% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 121 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. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds
At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 10 most profitable companies in the world to pick the best large-cap stocks to buy. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our website.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
