Greenhaven Road Capital, an investment management firm, published its second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly return of approximately 6% net of fees was recorded by the fund for the second quarter of 2021, bringing YTD returns to approximately 21%. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Greenhaven Road Capital, the fund mentioned Elastic N.V. (NYSE: ESTC), and discussed its stance on the firm. Elastic N.V. is a Mountain View, California-based software security company, that currently has a $13.4 billion market capitalization. ESTC delivered a 0.84% return since the beginning of the year, extending its 12-month returns to 53.20%. The stock closed at $146.79 per share on July 29, 2021.
Here is what Greenhaven Road Capital has to say about Elastic N.V. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“Our top five holdings represent more than half of our total long exposure and therefore five greatly influence overall returns. Elastic Software (ESTC) – Management continues to innovate and execute, rolling out new products and converting existing users from free to paid versions. They made adjustments to their licensing agreements, making it more difficult for Amazon to rip them off, and provided forward guidance that convinced investors that the growth train will continue to run for at least a few more years.”
Photo by Danial Igdery on Unsplash
Based on our calculations, Elastic N.V. (NYSE: ESTC) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. ESTC was in 52 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 49 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. Elastic N.V. (NYSE: ESTC) delivered a 22.17% 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.
