Appleseed Fund, an investment management firm, published its second-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 4.54% was recorded by the fund for the Q2 of 2021, underperforming its MSCI World benchmark that delivered a 7.74% return 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 Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) is one of them. Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) is a global multi-level marketing corporation that develops and sells dietary supplements. In the last three months, Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) stock lost 16%. Here is what the fund said:
“For long-term investors in Appleseed Fund, Herbalife should be a familiar name, as this will now be the third time that we have purchased Herbalife shares. We only hope that the third time will be as profitable for Appleseed Fund shareholders as the first two times. For those unfamiliar with the company, Herbalife is a global marketer of nutritional products to consumers worldwide. With just 20% of revenues attributable to the United States, the company markets its products through a multi-level distributor network. The business is currently growing at a double-digit annual rate and is generating gross margins of more than 75%, making Herbalife a quickly growing and we believe an attractive business. Herbalife’s business is “capital-light,” which means that the company does not require much in the way of capital investment to grow, allowing Herbalife to generate free cash flow that can mostly be returned to shareholders. Since 2013, Herbalife has used its free cash flow to buy back its stock, resulting in a share count that has declined by more than a third since 2013. Herbalife has a clean bill of health from a regulatory standpoint; its compliance function is the gold standard within the multi-level marketing industry.
At our purchase price, Herbalife shares were trading at the same share price as 2018. The company is firing on almost all cylinders right now, but its shares are undervalued for two reasons. First, the company’s China business has been struggling. We are not so worried about Herbalife’s China business because China represents only 5.5% of company revenues. Moreover, we believe the setbacks are temporary, and management has put a plan in place to reinvigorate revenue growth in China. Second, investors are worried that the company’s growth rate will be harmed as the economy opens up again. We conservatively assume that the company’s long-term growth rate will be 5% per annum, which is quite a bit lower than the 19% growth rate that Herbalife posted in Q1 2021. However, even assuming a 5% growth rate, Herbalife shares are significantly undervalued. Herbalife was trading at less than 10x earnings per share when we bought the stock, which represented an outstanding bargain, in our view.”
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Earlier this month, we published an article revealing that Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) was one of the 15 most valuable health and fitness companies in the world.
In Q1 2021, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) stock decreased by about 2% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers don’t believe in HLF’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) 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.
