Here’s Why ClearBridge Investments Sold its Visa (V) Position

ClearBridge Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Select Strategy” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The ClearBridge Select Strategy slightly underperformed its Russell 3000 Index benchmark in the first quarter. On an absolute basis, the Strategy had gains across nine of the 10 sectors in which it was invested during the quarter (out of 11 sectors total) You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

ClearBridge Investments, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Visa Inc. (NYSE: V), and shared their insights on the company. Visa Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based financial services company that currently has a $506.3 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, Visa delivered a 5.22% return, extending its 12-month gains to 15.29%. As of June 04, 2021, the stock closed at $230.14 per share.

Here is what ClearBridge Investments has to say about Visa Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“To make room for these new names with more attractive outlooks related to the reopening, we sold out of companies where the thesis is not playing out at the pace we expected including Visa.”

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Our calculations show that Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) ranks 5th in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the first quarter of 2021, Visa Inc. was in 164 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 166 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. Visa delivered a 6.84% 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.