Blue Hawk Investment on Airbnb (ABNB): ‘The Future is Bright for This Young Company’

Blue Hawk Investment Group, an investment management firm, published its fourth-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 7.48% was recorded by the fund for the Q4 of 2020, below its S&P 500 benchmark that delivered an 11.69% return. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Blue Hawk Investment Group mentioned Airbnb stock in their Q4 letter, and said that they established a position in Airbnb, Inc. (NASDAQ: ABNB), and has high growth expectations from it. Airbnb, Inc. is a vacation rental company that currently has a $119 billion market cap. For the past month, ABNB delivered a decent 35.31% return and settled at $200.43 per share at the closing of February 8th.

Here is what Blue Hawk Investment Group said:

“We typically avoid new issues, with ABNB being a rare exception. ABNB fits right into our wheelhouse as a leader in a promising industry, with a disruptive business model, unique company culture, massive addressable market, and a name synonymous with a category (“got an Airbnb for the weekend”). Towards the end of the year, the narrative of the hot IPO/SPAC environment we found to be fitting, with exception. We believe grouping ABNB into this category is a mistake. The IPO was botched, but the mistake was the initial offering price being far too low in this case. We believe the reason for this initial mispricing was the proximity of the IPO to the vaccine effectiveness data release. The data turned out to be much better than anticipated, a blue-sky result, causing a drastic change in the outlook for travel and lodging, the industry in which ABNB operates. Bayes Theorem in action, people typically have a bias when incorporating new information, in that they do not adjust their view as quickly as they should, and the vaccine data release required an almost complete reversal of views.

Back to the company, we started buying on day one and continued to build a position into the $120s and $130s. A founder-led firm, we believe the company has an excellent management team, a very attractive growth profile with many levers at their disposal, and embedded optionality due to their attractive position in the travel ecosystem (and minimal reliance on Google). The most underappreciated aspect of the story is the attractiveness of the financial model. Not many IPOs come along that get us excited, but we believe the future is bright for this young company. We will reveal more details about our thesis in future letters.”

Blue Hawk Investment on Airbnb (ABNB): 'The Future is Bright for This Young Company'

Sam DCruz / Shutterstock.com

Last January, we published an article that talks about Airbnb, Inc. (NASDAQ: ABNB)’s IPO success.  ABNB delivered a 36.53% return YTD.

Our calculations show that Airbnb, Inc. (NASDAQ: ABNB) does not belong in our list of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.

The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 216% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 121 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. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.

Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.