Carillon Tower Advisers, an investment management firm, published its “Carillon Eagle Small Cap Growth Fund” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. Small-cap stocks experienced a bit of a disappointing quarter as both growth and value indexes saw negative quarterly returns for the first time since the pandemic-led market selloff in the early part of 2020. In a continuation of the recent trend, the Russell 2000® Growth Index (down 5.65%) trailed its Russell 2000® Value Index (down 2.98%) counterpart once again, with this quarter now marking four consecutive quarters of underperformance for growth. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.
Carillon Tower Advisers, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Nevro Corp. (NYSE: NVRO) and discussed its stance on the firm. Nevro Corp. is a Redwood City, California-based medical device company with a $3.7 billion market capitalization. NVRO delivered a -37.07% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by -36.20%. The stock closed at $108.94 per share on November 8, 2021.
Here is what Carillon Tower Advisers has to say about Nevro Corp. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“Nevro is a medical device company providing innovative solutions for the treatment of chronic pain. Despite releasing very positive clinical data results for two new indications of its spinal cord stimulator (painful diabetic neuropathy and non-surgical refractory back pain), these future drivers of growth could not offset weakness in the sales of its flagship neurostimulator for chronic pain relief. The company believes this slump in sales was largely the result of COVID, but because there were aspects to this softness that were not entirely understood, the company withdrew guidance and the stock subsequently underperformed. We sold the stock.”
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Based on our calculations, Nevro Corp. (NYSE: NVRO) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. NVRO was in 26 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 29 funds in the previous quarter. Nevro Corp. (NYSE: NVRO) delivered a -8.21% 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.
