Is Abbott Laboratories (ABT) a Smart Long-term Buy?

Baron Health Care Fund recently published its third-quarter commentary – a copy of which can be downloaded here. During the third quarter of 2020, the Baron Health Care Fund returned 11.64% (institutional shares). In comparison, the benchmark S&P 500 Index was up 8.93%, while the Russell 3000 Health Care Index was up 6.48%. You should check out Baron’s top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of 2021.

In the Q3 2020 Investor Letter, Baron Health Care Fund highlighted a few stocks and Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) is one of them. Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) is a healthcare company. Year-to-date, Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) stock gained 22.4% and on December 9th it had a closing price of $106.32. Here is what Baron Health Care Fund said:

“Global medical device company Abbott Laboratories contributed to performance on increased sales of diagnostic products used for COVID-19 diagnosis. Abbott also received FDA approval of Libre 2.0, its glucose monitoring device for patients with diabetes. We continue to believe Abbott has the ability to generate solid long-term growth driven by multiple areas of its business.”

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Last month, we published an article revealing that Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) is one of the top 5 earnings growth stocks with dividends for 2021.

In Q3 2020, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) stock decreased by about 7% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers don’t believe in Abbott’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) isn’t ranked among 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.