Rowan Street Capital LLC, an investment management firm, published its fourth-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be seen here. In its letter, the fund said that the recent quarter was particularly tough in terms of market performance for most digital economy stocks and for its focused strategy, where its portfolio declined -12.3%. This resulted in a -19.4% (gross) decline for the full year 2021. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.
Rowan Street Capital, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) and discussed its stance on the firm. Netflix, Inc. is a Los Gatos, California-based production company with a $176.0 billion market capitalization. NFLX delivered a -34.02% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by -29.67%. The stock closed at $397.50 per share on January 21, 2022.
Here is what Rowan Street Capital has to say about Netflix, Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:
“It’s always good to remind ourselves of what we are trying to really do here in the first place?
As we constantly repeat this in almost all annual letters, our goal from day one was to compound our investor’s capital at double-digit returns over the long run.
Now, everyone loves outsized returns. We could compare a strong track record of long-term returns to a fit body. Both need a lot of patience, discipline and both require you to “pay the price.” The reality is that the majority of people lack patience, lack discipline and are just not willing to “pay the price.” We all know what paying the price in fitness really means, but let’s take a look at what that means in investing.
Let’s look at an example of Netflix stock performance since 2010 and compare that to the S&P 500 index. As you can tell from the chart below, the difference over the past 12 years has been absolutely staggering and leaves anyone salivating over these kinds of returns (6,981% for NFLX vs. 312% for the S&P 500).
(Click here to see the charts)
With that, now let’s take a look at the “Cost of Admission” in order to generate these kinds of returns. We want to show you the painful drawdowns over the same time period since 2010. Here, you had a couple of 80% drawdowns back in 2011-2013 time period, a bunch of 40% drawdowns, and countless 20%+ drawdowns.
So, the question is how many people do you think actually were able to withstand the volatility of Netflix stock over the last 12 years, pay the price and hold it all the way through? During the investment period shown above, Netflix was up almost seventy-fold, and this volatility is the price you had to pay to get it. A lot of market participants are striving for these outsized returns, but just don’t want to pay that price. It seems too risky and they try to cling towards safety without realizing that this is the cost of admission for above average returns.
The good news is that at Rowan Street we do have the patience, the discipline and are very willing to ’pay the price’ in order to achieve the long-term results we have outlined. All that we ask of you, our Limited Partners, is to trust our process and to allow us to do what we do best — compound your hard-earned capital over time. If you can do that, our partnership will work like magic — we are confident in that! In addition, you should derive some comfort in that majority of our net worth is invested in Rowan Street alongside with you (we like to eat our own cooking). We want our partners’ financial fortunes to move in lockstep with ours.”
Photo by Thibault Penin on Unsplash
Our calculations show that Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) ranks 15th on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. NFLX was in 106 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021, compared to 113 funds in the previous quarter. Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) delivered a -40.21% return in the past 3 months.
In December 2021, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on NFLX 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.
