Baron Health Care Fund recently published its fourth-quarter commentary – a copy of which can be downloaded here. During the fourth quarter of 2020, the Baron Health Care Fund returned 17.1% (institutional shares). In comparison, the benchmark S&P 500 Index was up 12.15%, while the Russell 3000 Health Care Index was up 10.08%. You should check out Baron’s top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of 2021.
In the Q4 2020 Investor Letter, Baron Health Care Fund highlighted a few stocks and AstraZeneca Plc (NASDAQ:AZN) is one of them. AstraZeneca Plc (NASDAQ:AZN) is a pharmaceutical company. In the last three months, AstraZeneca Plc (NASDAQ:AZN) stock lost 4.4% and on February 17th it had a closing price of $51.45. Here is what Baron Health Care Fund said:
“AstraZeneca PLC is a multinational pharmaceutical company developing drugs across multiple therapeutic areas such as oncology and respiratory diseases. Shares were impacted by news of AstraZeneca’s joint development with Oxford University of a viral-based COVID-19 vaccine. Given a mixed data set due to an unforeseen error in dosing that occurred in the Brazilian market, the vaccine timelines slipped, hurting share performance. Our investment thesis on AstraZeneca is not dependent on COVID-19 but rather its best-in-class large-cap growth profile, and we retain conviction.”
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In Q3 2020, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on AstraZeneca Plc (NASDAQ:AZN) stock decreased by about 13% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers don’t believe in AstraZeneca’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that AstraZeneca Plc (NASDAQ:AZN) 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.
At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 15 best innovative stocks to buy to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our website:
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
