Is Denali Therapeutics (DNLI) A Smart Long-Term Buy?

Artisan Partners Limited Partnership, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Small Cap Fund’ fourth quarter 2020 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 27.07% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTSX, 27.14% by its Advisor Class: APDSX, and 27.15% by its Institutional Class: APHSX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, all below its Russell 2000 Growth Benchmark that delivered a 29.61% return and its Russel 2000 Index that was up by 31.37% in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Artisan Small Cap Fund, in their Q4 2020 investor letter, mentioned Denali Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: DNLI) and emphasized their views on the company. Denali Therapeutics Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based biotechnology company that currently has a $7.2 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, DNLI delivered a -28.96% return,but its 12-month gains are impressively up by 233.89%. As of March 17, 2021, the stock closed at $64.36 per share.

Here is what Artisan Small Cap Fund has to say about Denali Therapeutics Inc. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:

“We started new investment campaign in Denali. Denali develops medicines for the treatment of rare neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease). The company is developing treatments to apply molecular biology and genetics to unique targets in neurology in the same way these disciplines were applied to oncology in the past. We believe the extraordinary size of the opportunity, the quality of management and our historical interactions with two board members make this a unique profit cycle opportunity.”

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Our calculations show that Denali Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: DNLI) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Denali Therapeutics Inc. was in 20 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 24 funds in the third quarter. DNLI delivered a -27.87% 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.