In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Alger, the fund mentioned Magnite, Inc. (NASDAQ: MGNI), and discussed its stance on the firm. Magnite, Inc. is a Los Angeles, California-based online advertising company, that currently has a $4.3 billion market capitalization. MGNI delivered a 7.16% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 325.19%. The stock closed at $32.91 per share on August 06, 2021.
Here is what Alger has to say about Magnite, Inc. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“Magnite provides an advertising supply side platform for publishers. The technology helps publishers such as network television stations or cable news providers automate the sale of digital advertising inventory across different formats and channels, like desktop, mobile, video, audio, connected TV and over-the-top TV. Publishers monetize their digital advertising inventory by using Magnite’s platform to access a global market of ad buyers, including advertising agencies that use supply side platforms. Magnite also helps sellers decrease costs and protect their brands and user experience. Magnite receives ad inventory from sellers and optimizes publishers’ revenue yields by processing the highest buyer bids. Currently, Magnite keeps approximately 10% of ad spend as revenue (i.e. take rate) and passes on the remainder of the ad spend to publishers. Magnite’s clients include many of the world’s leading publishers of websites and mobile applications and the company believes that its platform reaches approximately 1billion individuals globally.
Shares of Magnite underperformed in the second quarter due to the growth market selloff and slower-than-expected growth in connected TV during the first three months of this year. We believe the 32% growth in connected TV was below expectations and due to a one-time issue with one of the company’s publishing partners that ran out of advertising inventory. Management noted the issue has been fixed and the company saw strong reaccelerating growth in April. Additionally, we believe Magnite’s recent acquisition of video advertising company SpotX will significantly bolster the company’s positioning within connected TV, a high-growth area of the digital advertising market that is taking share from linear TV ad budgets.”
Based on our calculations, Magnite, Inc. (NASDAQ: MGNI) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. MGNI was in 25 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 29 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. Magnite, Inc. (NASDAQ: MGNI) delivered a 19.28% 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.