Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron Real Estate Fund” second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly return of 4.65% was delivered by the fund’s institutional shares for the Q2 of 2021, below both its MSCI Real Estate and MSCI US REIT benchmarks that delivered 6.99% and 11.74% returns respectively for the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Baron Funds, the fund mentioned Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: OPEN) and discussed its stance on the firm. Opendoor Technologies Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based digital platform for residential real estate with a $10.3 billion market capitalization. OPEN delivered a -27.52% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 49.10%. The stock closed at $17.55 per share on August 13, 2021.
Here is what Baron Funds has to say about Opendoor Technologies Inc. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“Following exceptionally strong share price performance in 2020 and early in 2021, the shares of Opendoor Technologies Inc. declined sharply in the last few months. Opendoor provides a digital platform for residential real estate that allows for the purchase and sale of homes on a mobile device. The company generated $2.5 billion of revenues last year, and management, who we have high regard for, believes there is a path to growing revenues to $50 billion over time!
At its recent price of $17 (versus a peak price of $36 in February), we believe the shares are attractively valued and offer compelling upside in the next
few years.”
Leonardo da/Shutterstock.com
Based on our calculations, Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: OPEN) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. OPEN was in 33 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 28 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: OPEN) delivered a 7.81% return in the past 3 months.
Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ small-cap stock picks managed to beat the market by double digits annually between 1999 and 2016, but the margin of outperformance has been declining in recent years. Nevertheless, we were still able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that underperformed the market by 10 percentage points annually between 2006 and 2017. Interestingly the margin of underperformance of these stocks has been increasing in recent years. Investors who are long the market and short these stocks would have returned more than 27% annually between 2015 and 2017. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 in our quarterly newsletter.
At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, lithium mining is one of the fastest growing industries right now, so we are checking out stock pitches like this emerging lithium stock. We go through lists like the 10 best EV stocks 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 homepage.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
