Is it a Good Time to Take Some Profits in Your Arista Networks (ANET) Stake?

Giverny Capital, an asset management firm, published its fourth-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly net return of 10.73% was delivered by the fund for the fourth quarter of 2021, slightly below its benchmark, the S&P 500 Index, which delivered an 11.03% gain for the same period. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.

Giverny Capital Asset Management, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE: ANET) and discussed its stance on the firm. Arista Networks, Inc. is a Santa Clara, California-based computer networking company with a $36.9 billion market capitalization. ANET delivered a -16.39% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 56.31%. The stock closed at $120.19 per share on January 28, 2022.

Here is what Giverny Capital Asset Management has to say about Arista Networks, Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:

“Against that backdrop, it’s fair to say we had a few stocks rise so much in 2021 that I felt compelled to take some profit while maintaining significant exposure. I sold a bit of our holding in Arista Networks at a split-adjusted $133 after a remarkable rise during the year. Arista is now our fourth-largest position…

Arista Networks finished the year as our number three position, thanks to a near doubling of the stock price. Arista makes switches and routers used by hyperscale data center operators – Microsoft and
Facebook are its two largest customers. Increasingly it is also a preferred solution for corporate communications networks. Arista sells hardware with an easy-to-use software operating system, which allows customers to manage their networks as they grow. This sounds straightforward, but most of Arista’s competition strictly sells hardware. Arista generated sales of just under $3 billion in 2021. The
market leader, Cisco Systems, has annual revenue of about $50 billion. Cisco is a fine company, but if Arista can continue to deliver great products that are easy to for customers for manage, there should be years of growth ahead.”

Our calculations show that Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE: ANET) failed to obtain a mark on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. ANET was in 32) hedge fund portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021, compared to 35 funds in the previous quarter. Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE: ANET) delivered a 17.35% return in the past 3 months.

In January 2021, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on ANET in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.