Cooper Investors, an investment management firm, published its “Cooper Investors Global Equities Fund (Hedged)” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. For the rolling three months to one year, the Fund returned 5.7% and 28.24% respectively, while its benchmark, by comparison, returned -0.42% and 26.57% over the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.
Cooper Investors, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) and discussed its stance on the firm. Intuit Inc. is a Mountain View, California-based software company with a $156.4 billion market capitalization. INTU delivered a 50.80% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 72.12%. The stock closed at $572.80 per share on October 19, 2021.
Here is what Cooper Investors has to say about Intuit Inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“The other meaningful deal during the quarter was Intuit’s acquisition of Mailchimp for $12bn. Intuit has reinvented itself over the last decade and thrived with a leadership position in QuickBooks Online, the financial accounting software for small businesses (effectively the ‘Xero of the US’). We originally invested in Intuit in February 2020, excited by the QuickBooks prospects.
Management have executed exceptionally well on the opportunity set which has seen the shares double since our initial purchase. However, the company has now conducted two meaningful deals in Mailchimp and Credit Karma worth a combined US$20bn over the last 12 months. The investment proposition has shifted from a focus on QuickBooks to now being a financial and small business software conglomerate. We continue to very much admire the company, but with Intuit now trading on 50x forward earnings we no longer see such attractive latency on offer, nor the rewards for the level of execution risk and thus we have exited the position.”
Based on our calculations, Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. INTU was in 66 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 68 funds in the previous quarter. Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) delivered an 11.34% 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.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
