Madison Funds, an investment management firm, published its “Madison Investors Fund” third-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly portfolio return of 0.07% was recorded by the fund’s Class Y shares for the third quarter of 2021, with an 11.86% gain on a year-to-date basis, compared to the S&P 500 Index’s gains of 0.58%, for the third quarter and 15.92% year-to-date (YTD). You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.
Madison Funds, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Analog Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADI) and discussed its stance on the firm. Analog Devices, Inc. is a Norwood, Massachusetts-based semiconductor manufacturing company with a $95.1 billion market capitalization. ADI delivered a 19.94% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 42.02%. The stock closed at $176.63 per share on October 19, 2021.
Here is what Madison Funds has to say about Analog Devices, Inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“At its 2017 investor day, Analog Device’s VP of Automotive, Mark Gill, described how the company’s content on well-equipped electric vehicles was $600 per car compared to $250 per car for the traditional 2017 internal combustion engine car. Since then, Analog has highlighted the success of its EV battery management systems (BMS) product nearly every quarter. The BMS product is hardware and software that manages the power into and out of the battery systems. It’s the brains of the operation. Analog says it’s on its fifth generation BMS product, that it has the no. 1 market share in high voltage products, and that it is on 5 of the top 10 selling EVs. While we think that the BMS product is just 1 to 1.5% of Analog’s product mix, we think that it could add nearly a point of revenue growth per year to the company’s top-line given the expected ramp in EV production. This is a material amount of growth atop an already nicely growing company revenue line.”
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Based on our calculations, Analog Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADI) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. ADI was in 62 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 50 funds in the previous quarter. Analog Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADI) delivered a 7.43% 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.
