Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Mid Cap Fund’ first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of -2.36% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTMX, -2.32% by its Advisor Class: APDMX, and -2.30% by its Institutional Class: APHMX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, all below the Russell Midcap® Growth Index that delivered a -0.57% return and the Russell Midcap® Index that was up by 8.14% for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Artisan Mid Cap Fund, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Verisk Analytics, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSK), and shared their insights on the company. Verisk Analytics, Inc. is a Jersey City, New Jersey-based analytics company that currently has a $28.3 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, VRSK delivered a -15.69% return, while its 12-month gains are up by 10.58%. As of May 06, 2021, the stock closed at $175.02 per share.
Here is what Artisan Mid Cap Fund has to say about Verisk Analytics, Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“We ended our campaign in Verisk Analytics. Verisk Analytics is a data analytics provider to customers in insurance, energy markets and financial services. While the company’s core insurance business (~70% of revenue) remains on solid fundamental footing, we expect energy and financial services acquisitions made in recent years—an effort to diversify its business mix—to weigh on profit growth. We believe this will be further amplified as COVID cost savings reverse in 2021 and as the company invests in new products. With better growth opportunities in our pipeline, we exited our position.”
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Our calculations show that Verisk Analytics, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSK) 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, Verisk Analytics, Inc. was in 32 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 40 funds in the third quarter. VRSK delivered a -7.10% 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.
