Polen Capital Management, a value-driven, concentrated, long-term investment management firm, published its ‘Polen Global Growth’ fourth-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 7.70% was recorded by the fund for the Q4 of 2020, below its MSCI All-Country World benchmark that delivered a 14.69% return. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Polen Global Growth, in their Q4 2020 Investor Letter, said that they added their position in Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) because of the company’s increasing sales of COVID tests. Abbott Laboratories is a company that manufactures and sells medical devices, diagnostics, medicines and nutritional supplements. It currently has a $219.8 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, ABT is up by 13%.
Here is what Polen Global Growth has to say about Abbott Laboratories in their investor letter:
“During the quarter, we added our position in Abbott Laboratories. We felt it was prudent to reallocate capital to faster-growing companies with greater business momentum like Abbott. Abbott Labs was in a favorable position to grow durably before COVID-19 swept across the world. The company pivoted rapidly to help societies manage the disease’s spread by creating accurate and rapid tests. Abbott has now sold over 100 million COVID tests globally and is building manufacturing capacity to meet further demand for testing around the world. In the company’s most recent quarter alone, it generated $880 million in COVID-related testing sales, likely influenced by the release of the company’s BinaxNOW COVID-19 rapid test, which can detect COVID in just 15 minutes with no instrumentation required (this is Abbott’s 6th COVID-19 test).
Abbott met the moment when COVID-19 became a global pandemic by going into overdrive to manufacture millions of tests
per month. These capabilities have become an accelerant to company revenue growth.With Abbott’s other business segments potentially returning to pre-COVID-19 growth in the near future, we believe the company is even better positioned than before the global pandemic to generate double-digit EPS growth during the next five years. It is difficult to know how long COVID testing will remain a meaningful driver of growth or how long the world will be dealing with the disease. That said, it has allowed Abbott to meaningfully grow its installed base of testing equipment and systems, which are capable of testing and detecting a whole host of many other diseases. Given the combination of these variables, we raised the position to an above-average weight. It is currently one of our largest positions within the Portfolio.”
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Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) was in 62 hedge fund portfolios. Its all time high statistics is 67. ABT delivered a 41.15% return in the past 12 months.
Our calculations show that Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) does not belong in our list of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 216% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 121 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. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
