Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron Opportunity Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 0.88% was delivered by the fund’s institutional shares for the Q1 of 2021, below both its S&P 500 and Russell 3000 Growth Index that delivered a 6.17% and 1.19% returns respectively for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Baron Opportunity Fund, in their Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), and shared their insights on the company. Alphabet Inc. is a Mountain View, California-based conglomerate company that currently has a $1.59 trillion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, GOOG delivered a 37.57% return, extending its 12-month gains to 81.65%. As of April 30, 2021, the stock closed at $2,410.12 per share.
Here is what Baron Opportunity Fund has to say about Alphabet Inc. in their Q1 2021 investor letter:
“Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, is discussed further in the Review and Outlook section above and the Top Purchases section below. Google is the world’s largest search and online advertising company, and a top cloud computing player. Shares rose in the quarter on strong fourth quarter results that saw solid revenue growth of 23% and expanding operating margins. Search grew 17%, YouTube grew 46%, and total cloud revenue grew 46%, with Google cloud computing meaningfully ahead. CEO Sundar Pichai began the earnings call with this statement: “The past year…accelerated the shift to cloud and adoption of online services. This has profound implications for all companies and consumers….Google’s products…have been a lifeline for millions of small, medium businesses hit hard by the pandemic.”
Our calculations show that Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) ranks 6th in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Alphabet Inc. was in 157 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 150 funds in the third quarter. GOOG delivered a 26.76% return in the past 3 months.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 231.2% between 2015 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 126 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. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
