Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron Health Care Fund” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 1.18% was delivered by the fund’s institutional shares for the third quarter of 2021, outperforming both its S&P 500 and Russell 3000 Health Care benchmarks that delivered 0.58% and 0.17% returns 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.
Baron Funds, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Moderna, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRNA) and discussed its stance on the firm. Moderna, Inc. is a Massachusetts, United States-based biopharmaceutical company with a $96 billion market capitalization. MRNA delivered a 126.85% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 227.11%. The stock closed at $236.99 per share on November 5, 2021.
Here is what Baron Funds has to say about Moderna, Inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“Moderna, Inc. is a leader in the emerging field of mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics. Shares performed well for the quarter. Moderna has been one of the most successful companies in the race to develop and provide a COVID-19 vaccine and is focusing on introducing a COVID-19 booster combined with the flu shot. With the COVID-19 vaccine success under its belt, we think Moderna has potential to disrupt the entire biopharmaceutical industry, from infectious disease vaccines to oncology and rare disease treatment.”
Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash
Based on our calculations, Moderna, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRNA) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. MRNA was in 37 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 39 funds in the previous quarter. Moderna, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRNA) delivered a -42.72% 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.
