Artisan Partners: “We have High Hopes on Alphabet (GOOG) Regarding Future Prospects”

Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its “Artisan Value Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 10.78% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTLX, 10.76% by its Advisor Class: APDLX, and 10.75% by its Institutional Class: APHLX for the first quarter of 2021, all below the Russell 1000® Value Index that delivered an 11.26% return, but outperforming the Russell 1000® Index that gained 5.91% in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Artisan Partners, 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 technology company that currently has a $1.59 trillion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, GOOG delivered a 37.66% return, extending its 12-month gains to 68.43%. As of May 28, 2021, the stock closed at $2,411.56 per share.

Here is what Artisan Partners has to say about Alphabet Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“Large-cap tech companies have been resilient through the pandemic—Alphabet among them. A top contributor, Alphabet’s Play Store and Google Cloud are in demand as businesses accelerate online activity which, along with strong YouTube user growth, is helping stabilize temporarily weaker search ad revenue trends. Through the lens of our disciplined bottom-up research process, we view Alphabet as one of the best businesses in the world, capable of expanding revenues at a rapid rate for years to come, with a bullet proof balance sheet and an average asking price. It’s a name we’ve owned since 2012 and for which we continue to have high hopes regarding future prospects.”

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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 first quarter of 2021, Alphabet Inc. was in 159 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 157 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. GOOG delivered a 15.86% 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.