Richie Capital Group, an investment management firm, published its third-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly portfolio net return of -5.0% was recorded by the RCG Long Only strategy for the third quarter of 2021, while the RCG Long Short Fund lost -5.3%. The fund’s closest benchmarks, the Russell 3000 Index and the Equity Long-Short Index returned -0.1% and -0.2% respectively for the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.
Richie Capital Group, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Intelligent Systems Corporation (NYSE: INS) and discussed its stance on the firm. Intelligent Systems Corporation is a Norcross, Georgia-based software company with a $357.6 million market capitalization. INS delivered a 1.98% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 1.93%. The stock closed at $40.78 per share on October 13, 2021.
Here is what Richie Capital Group has to say about Intelligent Systems Corporation in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“Intelligent Systems (INS – up 27.9%) – The boutique credit card processing software company continued to execute to plan. In their most recent earnings report, INS revealed that their investments in the Middle East are generating benefits as they are now recognizing revenue from a new customer, the Al Ansari Exchange. Al Ansari was previously a customer of the now defunct Wirecard. They also announced a new partnership with Vervent, a San Diego based Lending-as-aService (LaaS) company to enhance credit card servicing solutions. INS’ solutions will enable Vervent to provide more flexible lending offerings and launch new client card programs faster. INS continues to make prudent investments and the company is gaining momentum. As Covid moderates (or the world normalizes life with Covid), the company’s Middle Eastern operations will become more productive.”
Photo by Danial Igdery on Unsplash
Based on our calculations, Intelligent Systems Corporation (NYSE: INS) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. INS was in 9 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 7 funds in the previous quarter. Intelligent Systems Corporation (NYSE: INS) delivered a 28.43% 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.
