Ariel Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Ariel Fund”, “Ariel Appreciation Fund”, “Ariel Focus Fund”, “Ariel International Fund”, and “Ariel Global Fund” second-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 5.52% was recorded by Ariel Fund for the second quarter of 2021, 4.8% by Ariel Appreciation Fund, 4.0% by Ariel Focus Fund, 5.3% by Ariel International Fund, and 6.2% by Ariel Global Fund for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 Investor Letter, the fund highlighted a few stocks and APA Corp (NASDAQ:APA) is one of them. APA Corp (NASDAQ:APA) is the holding company for Apache Corporation, an American company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration. In the last three months, APA Corp (NASDAQ:APA) stock lost 1.3%. Here is what the fund said:
“APA Corp. (APA), (formerly Apache Corp.) increased +21.01%, benefitting from strong oil and natural gas markets. Crude oil is up +47% this year. We have lamented about surprisingly low natural gas prices in past letters and are pleased to see them moving higher this year.
Natural gas produces significantly less carbon emissions than either coal or crude oil. Equity investors have been badly burned by underperforming energy companies over the past decade. As a result, we believe they are still underestimating APA’s earning power. We have recently added to our holding.”
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In Q1 2021, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on APA Corp (NASDAQ:APA) stock increased by about 20% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers believe in APA’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that APA Corp (NASDAQ:APA) isn’t ranked among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
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.
