Artisan Partners Limited Partnership, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Value Fund’ fourth quarter 2020 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 20% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTLX, 20.05% by its Advisor Class: APDLX, and 20.07% by its Institutional Class: APHLX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, all outperformed its Russell 1000 Value Benchmark that delivered a 16.25% return and its Russel 1000 Index that was up by 13.69% in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Artisan Value Fund, in their Q4 2020 investor letter, mentioned Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and emphasized their views on the company. Morgan Stanley is a New York-based investment banking company that currently has a $156.8 million market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, MS delivered a 21.58% return, impressively extending its 12-month gains to 180.82%. As of March 18, 2021, the stock closed at $83.94 per share.
Here is what Artisan Value Fund has to say about Morgan Stanley in their Q4 2020 investor letter:
“Top three contributor Morgan Stanley, a leading global financial services company, came into the portfolio in Q4 as a result of its purchase of E*TRADE. E*TRADE is a great fit on Morgan Stanley’s wealth management platform and provides a considerable amount of non-interest-bearing deposit funding. James Gorman, chairman and CEO, has steadily de-risked Morgan Stanley’s business by adding less volatile fee streams and deemphasizing the risk-obtuse culture of prior management. We believe the market will come to appreciate this mix shift over time.”
Our calculations show that Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) 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, Morgan Stanley was in 66 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 70 funds in the third quarter. MS delivered a 29.97% 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.
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 15 best innovative stocks to buy to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. 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.