Polen Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Polen U.S. SMID Company Growth Composite” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 2.35% was delivered by the fund for the first quarter of 2021, trailing its Russell 2500 Growth benchmark that delivered a 2.49% gain for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Polen Capital, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Aspen Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: AZPN), and shared their insights on the company. Aspen Technology, Inc. is a Bedford, Massachusetts-based software company that currently has a $9.5 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, AZPN delivered a 7.82% return, extending its 12-month gains to 38.12%. As of May 26, 2021, the stock closed at $140.44 per share.
Here is what Polen Capital has to say about Aspen Technology, Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“We added to Aspen Technology primarily because of our excitement about its competitive advantage. We view it as having the strongest competitive position in markets such as Chemicals, Energy, and Engineering & Construction. These areas exhibited some cyclical sensitivity, volatile spending, pricing and production impacts, and activity as a result of the pandemic, which could improve in the coming year. As such, Aspen Technology is participating in markets that we expect to improve in the coming months.”
Our calculations show that Aspen Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: AZPN) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the first quarter of 2021, Aspen Technology, Inc. was in 32 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 29 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. AZPN delivered a -9.01% 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.
