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 Mattel Inc (NASDAQ:MAT) is one of them. Mattel Inc (NASDAQ:MAT) is a toy company. In the last three months, Mattel Inc (NASDAQ:MAT) stock gained 16.2% and on March 29th it had a closing price of $19.81. Here is what the fund said:
“Mattel (29%, 2.04%; 49%, 3.15%), the global toy and media company, was also a top performer for the year as well as for the quarter. The company’s third quarter was excellent across the board. Barbie’s resurgence continued with 30% growth, leading consolidated Mattel revenues up 10%. Gross margins expanded by 400 basis points, and the quarter’s EBITDA came in remarkably high at $470 million (for an $8.6 billion EV company), partially due to shifting advertising spending back towards the end of the year. Mattel typically earns all its annual profit during the fourth quarter holiday rush, and we expect another excellent sequential performance to result in over $100 million FCF for the year. CEO Ynon Kreiz has delivered extraordinary improvements to revenues, expenses and culture since he took over in 2018. This year the company reacted to store closures in March with a successful quick pivot towards e-commerce sales. Mattel has also continued to build out its intellectual property assets with 10 feature films under development, as well as over 25 TV projects and video games. These high-margin projects have not yet begun to boost the company’s financial results and should prove transformative over the next several years. In the COVID environment, Mattel worked to manufacture PPE for donation to medical professionals and launched a “Thank You Heroes” collection with all net proceeds being donated to First Responders First. The company gave grants to Feed the Children and Save the Children and donated art supplies, games and toys to students in need.”
Copyright: auremar / 123RF Stock Photo
Longleaf Partners has been a long time Mattel Inc (NASDAQ:MAT) bull. In December 2020, we shared Longleaf Partners’ bullish Mattel Inc (NASDAQ:MAT) thesis in this article.
Our calculations showed that Mattel Inc (NASDAQ:MAT) 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.
