Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Mid Cap Fund’ first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of -2.36% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTMX, -2.32% by its Advisor Class: APDMX, and -2.30% by its Institutional Class: APHMX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, all below the Russell Midcap® Growth Index that delivered a -0.57% return and the Russell Midcap® Index that was up by 8.14% for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Artisan Mid Cap Fund, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: SRPT), and shared their insights on the company. Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based medical research and drug development company that currently has a $5.9 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, SRPT delivered a -56.24% return, while its 12-month returns are down by -39.64%. As of May 06, 2021, the stock closed at $74.61 per share.
Here is what Artisan Mid Cap Fund has to say about Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“We ended our campaign in Sarepta Therapeutics. Sarepta Therapeutics is a leader in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) drug development. Shares were pressured during the quarter amid a disappointing clinical trial outcome for its DMD gene therapy. We believe the odds of FDA approval for this therapy are lower and the timeline longer. Fortunately, we controlled for this risk by keeping this holding in the GardenSM. While Sarepta’s pipeline of gene therapies for neuromuscular disorders remains attractive, we exited our position given this setback. We believe CropSM holding Catalent is a better risk-adjusted way to participate in these opportunities. Catalent is a leader in gene therapy manufacturing and one of Sarepta’s key partners.”
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Our calculations show that Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: SRPT) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. was in 37 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 35 funds in the third quarter. SRPT delivered a -22.06% return in the past 3 months.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 231.2% between 2015 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 126 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. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.