First Republic (FRC) Gave Ensemble Capital Hefty Gains

Ensemble Capital Management, an investment management firm, published its fourth-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. In the letter, they discussed the whole year performance of the fund in 2020 and also gave insights on the investment decisions they’ve made last year. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Ensemble Capital Management, in their Q4 2020 Investor Letter said that they consider First Republic Bank (NYSE: FRC) as one of the notable contributors to their performance. First Republic Bank is an investment banking company that currently has a $24.9 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, FRC delivered a decent 14.94% return and settled at $144.99 per share at the closing of January 29th.

Here is what Ensemble Capital Management has to say about First Republic Bank in their investor letter:

“A notable contributor to our performance came from First Republic. As a bank, First Republic benefits from higher interest rates and a steeper yield curve as Schwab does. But the company manages its balance sheet to minimize the volatility of their net interest margin, which reduces the stock’s sensitivity to interest rates. Even so, between the shift in interest rates and very strong recent results in growing their business, First Republic rallied 35%.”

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Last December 2020, we published an article telling that First Republic Bank (NYSE: FRC) was in 31 hedge fund portfolios. Its all time high statistics is 37. FRC delivered a decent 30.76% return in the past 12 months.

Our calculations show that First Republic Bank (NYSE: FRC) 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.