Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its “Artisan Value Fund” second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 7.77% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTLX, 7.81% by its Advisor Class: APDLX, and 7.87% by its Institutional Class: APHLX for the second quarter of 2021, all beating the Russell 1000® Value Index that delivered a 5.21% return, but below the Russell 1000® Index that gained 8.54% for the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Artisan Partners, the fund mentioned Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and discussed its stance on the firm. Alphabet Inc. is a Mountain View, California-based multinational conglomerate company with a $1.8 trillion market capitalization. GOOG delivered a 61.98% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 98.68%. The stock closed at $2,818.77 per share on September 22, 2021.
Here is what Artisan Partners has to say about Alphabet Inc. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“Top contributors included Alphabet. Advertising is recovering, and Alphabet is a key beneficiary through its search business and online video business YouTube. We continue to see large profit pools for Alphabet in the early stages of monetization, along with the migration of advertising dollars away from traditional mediums, like TV, to online search and video. These factors give us confidence Alphabet continues to have a long runway to grow revenue and profits. In addition, Alphabet’s cost controls are improving, which is driving more revenue growth to the bottom-line. Finally, management has begun to aggressively return capital to shareholders, which we think is another lever that is increasing per share value of the business. We view Alphabet as one of the best businesses in the world, capable of expanding revenues at a rapid rate for years to come, with a bulletproof balance sheet and an average asking price. It’s a name we’ve owned since 2012 and for which we continue to have high hopes regarding future prospects.”
Photo by Kai Wenzel on Unsplash
Based on our calculations, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) ranks 7th in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. GOOG was in 155 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 159 funds in the previous quarter. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) delivered an 11.49% 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.
