Argosy Investors, an investment management firm, published its second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A portfolio return of 16.5% was recorded by the fund for the second half of 2021, while the S&P 500 by comparison returned 15.3%. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Argosy Investors, the fund mentioned Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), and discussed its stance on the firm. Amazon.com, Inc. is a Seattle, Washington-based e-commerce company, that currently has a $1.6 trillion market capitalization. AMZN delivered a 2.29% return since the beginning of the year, extending its 12-month returns to 6.14%. The stock closed at $3,331.48 per share on August 02, 2021.
Here is what Argosy Investors has to say about Amazon.com, Inc. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“So how are our largest holdings affected in a world of higher wage inflation? As a general rule, I will evaluate current and potential future holdings on their capital intensivity and their ability to raise prices. Amazon is now (a part of) our top 5 largest equity holdings. Amazon is a more complex story. Their AWS business is largely a similar story to Facebook. Their first-party retail business is very asset-and labor-intensive given their extensive warehousing footprint. I think Amazon would have more pricing power than any other player, and despite being one of the largest employers in the US, bricks-and-mortar retail is likely still more asset- and labor-intensive than Amazon’s ecommerce footprint. With all that said, overall Amazon’s first-party business would be adversely impacted by inflation, but the combination of Amazon’s AWS and advertising business should provide fairly robust inflation protection.”
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Based on our calculations, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) ranks 3rd in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. AMZN was in 243 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 273 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) delivered a 0.59% 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.
