Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron FinTech Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 1.29% was delivered by the fund’s institutional shares for the Q1 of 2021, trailing the S&P 500 Index, which appreciated 6.17%, and modestly underperforming the FactSet Global FinTech Index which rose 2.77% for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Baron FinTech Fund, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned S&P Global Inc. (NYSE: SPGI), and shared their insights on the company. S&P Global Inc. is a New York, New York-based ratings, benchmarks, analytics and data provider that currently has a $91.3 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, SPGI delivered a 26.01% return, extending its 12-month gains to 108.12%. As of May 14, 2021, the stock closed at $379.16 per share.
Here is what Baron FinTech Fund has to say about S&P Global Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“S&P Global Inc. provides credit ratings, indexes, data, and analytics to the financial and commodities markets. Shares increased on strong fourth quarter results and 2021 guidance that exceeded Street expectations. Although bond issuance is expected to moderate after two years of exceptional growth, management still expects revenue to grow mid-single-digits this year. Also, shareholders overwhelmingly voted to approve the merger with IHS Markit. We continue to own the stock as we see a long runway for growth and significant competitive advantages for the company.”
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Our calculations show that S&P Global Inc. (NYSE: SPGI) 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, S&P Global Inc. was in 75 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 71 funds in the third quarter. SPGI delivered a 12.81% 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.
