Artisan Partners: “We Believe Glaukos Corp. (GKOS) has Significant Profit-Cycle Potential”

Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Small Cap Fund’ first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of -5.02% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTSX, -4.99% by its Advisor Class: APDSX, and -4.95% by its Institutional Class: APHSX for the fourth quarter of 2020, all below the Russell 2000® Growth Index that delivered a 4.88% return and the Russell 2000® Index that was up by 12.70% for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Artisan Small Cap Fund, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Glaukos Corporation (NYSE: GKOS), and shared their insights on the company. Glaukos Corporation is a San Clemente, California-based ophthalmic medical technology company that currently has a $3.4 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, GKOS delivered a -2.01% return, while its 12-month gains are up by 108.51%. As of May 17, 2021, the stock closed at $73.75 per share.

Here is what Artisan Small Cap Fund has to say about Glaukos Corporation in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

Glaukos is an ophthalmic medical technology company focused on breakthrough products and therapies to transform the treatment of glaucoma. The company is the leading ophthalmic medical device company and pioneer of the micro invasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS) device market, which we believe is in the early to middle innings of penetration. That said, we believe the MIGS market is the tip of the iceberg for Glaukos, as it has been leveraging its deep expertise in this area to build a full pipeline of micro-scale surgical devices, sustained pharmaceuticals therapies and implantable biosensors in corneal health and retinal disease. We expect several of these new products to launch over the near to medium term. Given these multiple growth avenues, we believe the company has significant profit-cycle potential.”

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Our calculations show that Glaukos Corporation (NYSE: GKOS) 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, Glaukos Corporation was in 13 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 15 funds in the third quarter. GKOS delivered a -18.71% 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.