Longleaf Partners Fund, a Memphis-based fund under Southeastern Asset Management, recently released its Q4 2020 Investor Letter, a copy of which you can download here. The fund posted a return of 22.75% for the quarter, outperforming its benchmark, the S&P 500 Index which returned 12.15% in the same quarter. You should check out Longleaf Partners’ top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of 2021.
In the Q4 2020 Investor Letter, the fund highlighted a few stocks and Lumen Technologies Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) is one of them. Lumen Technologies Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) is a telecommunications company. In the last three months, Lumen Technologies Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) stock gained 36% and on March 30th it had a closing price of $13.23. Here is what the fund said:
“Lumen (-19%, -2.71%; -1%, -0.12%), the fiber telecom company formerly named CenturyLink, was a top detractor for the year and the only (slight) detractor in the fourth quarter. During the last quarter, Enterprise fiber revenues grew 0.8% year-overyear, International and Global declined 2.6% and Small and Medium Business (SMB) shrunk 5.8% due to COVID repercussions. Yet margins slightly increased due to the strong cost controls of CEO Jeff Storey and CFO Neel Dev. Despite significant deleveraging over the last two years and multiple debt issuances this year at low to mid-single digit interest rates, the stock trades at an incredibly low multiple of <5x FCF. We believe Lumen can grow by continuing to invest into fiber, which should outweigh its declining legacy copper landline business. Numerous recent large transactions for fiber peers at double-digit EBITDA multiples and landline peers at mid-single digit EBITDA multiples also suggest that Lumen could monetize several of its segments at good prices well beyond its total market capitalization today. We have stepped up our engagement with the company and signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) last month, so unfortunately we cannot say more other than “stay tuned.””
Last month, we published an article revealing that Lumen Technologies Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) was one of the 10 best high yield stocks to buy now.
In Q3 2020, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Lumen Technologies Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) stock increased by about 3% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers believe in LUMN’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that Lumen Technologies Inc. (NYSE:LUMN) 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.
