Wasatch Advisors, an employee-owned investment manager, published its ‘Wasatch Small Cap Value Fund’ third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 4.48% was recorded by the fund for the Q3 of 2020, above its Russel 2000 Value benchmark that returned 2.56%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Wasatch Advisors, in their Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that their position in The Ensign Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENSG) paid off from the aging population of America. The Ensign Group, Inc. is a home health care services company that currently has a $4.5 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, ENSG delivered a 47.81% return and settled at $84.70 per share at the closing of January 15th.
Here is what Wasatch Advisors has to say about The Ensign Group, Inc. in their Investor Letter:
“A number of our top contributors in the third quarter were stocks that continued to recover from the first quarter selloff as better visibility returned to the market. One of the Fund’s leading contributors was Ensign Group, Inc. (ENSG), an operator of skilled-nursing facilities, is a prime example. We held on to the position through the downturn on the belief that Ensign is a well managed company in a business that continues to benefit from the aging population in the United States. This patience paid off in the most recent quarter, as the stock surged on news that it was turning away government assistance and managing challenges related to Covid-19 much better than other skilled-nursing operators.”
![](https://imonkey-blog.imgix.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/20121721/shutterstock_256173949.jpg?auto=fortmat&fit=clip&expires=1755993600&width=480&height=320)
ESB Professional/Shutterstock.com
Last October 2020, we published an article telling that The Ensign Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENSG) was in 19 hedge fund portfolios, its all time high statistics. ENSG delivered a 76.33% return in the past 12 months.
As of September 2020, Wasatch Advisors had a 6.1 million share position in ENSG that amounted to $349.5 million. However, our calculations showed that The Ensign Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENSG) does not belong to 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
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 10 most profitable companies in the world to pick the best large-cap stocks to buy. 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.