Baron Asset Fund recently published its first-quarter commentary – a copy of which can be downloaded here. During the first quarter of 2021, the Baron Asset Fund returned -1.03% (institutional shares). In comparison, the benchmark S&P 500 Index was up 6.17%, while the Russell Midcap Growth Index was down 0.57%. You should check out Baron Asset Fund’s top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of 2021.
In the Q1 2021 Investor Letter, the fund highlighted a few stocks and Guidewire Software Inc. (NYSE:GWRE) is one of them. Guidewire Software Inc. (NYSE:GWRE) is a software company. In the last three months, Guidewire Software Inc. (NYSE:GWRE) stock lost 12.5% and on April 23rd it had a closing price of $104.94. Here is what the fund said:
“Shares of property and casualty (“P&C”) insurance software vendor Guidewire Software, Inc. detracted from performance as shares of high-multiple growth stocks lagged. The company is near the midpoint of transitioning its software from an on-premise solution to a cloud-based offering, which we believe will correspond with improved financial results. Despite short-term headwinds, we believe Guidewire has tripled its addressable market through new products and cloud delivery and will become the critical software vendor for the global P&C insurance industry, potentially capturing 30% to 50% of its $15 billion to $30 billion total addressable market and generating margins above 40%.”
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Baron Fund has been a long time Guidewire Software Inc. (NYSE:GWRE) bull. In July 2020, we shared Baron Fund’s bullish GWRE’s thesis in this article.
In Q4 2020, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Guidewire Software Inc. (NYSE:GWRE) stock increased by about 3% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers believe in GWRE’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that Guidewire Software Inc. (NYSE:GWRE) 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.
