Madison Funds, an investment management firm, published its “Madison Small Cap Fund” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The Madison Small Cap Fund Class Y declined 4.70%, slightly underperforming the Russell 2000 by 34 basis points (bps) for the third quarter of 2021, while the Russell 2000 index was down 4.36% for 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.
Madison Funds, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Owens & Minor, Inc. (NYSE: OMI) and discussed its stance on the firm. Owens & Minor, Inc. is a Virginia, United States-based healthcare company with a $2.6 billion market capitalization. OMI delivered a 30.28% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 42.79%. The stock closed at $35.24 per share on October 20, 2021.
Here is what Madison Funds has to say about Owens & Minor, Inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“Healthcare continues to be a challenging sector. Our investments in Owens and Minor (OMI) meaningfully pulled back and detracted from our performance. Owens and Minor declined as investors fretted over the lack of sustainability in pandemic related demand for the company’s latex glove business and its impact on future results. While it is difficult to isolate the core earnings growth of the company due to the pandemic, we remain optimistic about its turnaround efforts. We believe there is meaningful margin expansion opportunity for OMI and we hold firm in our investment conviction.”
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Based on our calculations, Owens & Minor, Inc. (NYSE: OMI) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. OMI was in 20 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 16 funds in the previous quarter. Owens & Minor, Inc. (NYSE: OMI) delivered a -25.09% 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.
