Baron Opportunity Fund recently published its second-quarter commentary – a copy of which can be downloaded here. During the second quarter of 2021, the Baron Opportunity Fund returned 10.14% (institutional shares). In comparison, the benchmark S&P 500 Index was up 8.55%, while the Russell 3000 Growth Index was up 11.38%. You should check out Baron’s top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of 2021.
In the Q2 2021 Investor Letter, the fund highlighted a few stocks and RingCentral Inc. (NYSE:RNG) is one of them. RingCentral Inc. (NYSE:RNG) is a provider of cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions for businesses. In the last three months, RingCentral Inc. (NYSE:RNG) stock lost 3%. Here is what the fund said:
“RingCentral, Inc. has been a three-year portfolio holding and remains a leader in the cloud unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) space, which includes voice, video, messaging, and call center services. But after posting its third quarter in a row of accelerating revenue growth in the first quarter, RingCentral’s shares began to sell off on fears around heightened competition with both Microsoft Teams, of which RingCentral is a partner, and with Zoom Communications, a former partner who has launched its own voice communications offering. Shares sold off further during the period with the rotation out of secular growth names into cyclicals. We used the pullback in the shares to add significantly to our position given RingCentral’s best-in-class UCaaS technology, including five 9’s contractual service commitments (fully operational 99.999% of the time) for voice, which is orders of magnitude above its competitors; presence in roughly 40 countries; data governance and security requirements; number portability with all the relevant domestic and international carriers; and positioning as the Gartner Magic Quadrant UCaaS Leader. The UCaaS market is still quite early in its adoption curve, with only about 3% penetration of the roughly 400 million existing business landline seats in operation today. We believe RingCentral is in a solid position to capture meaningful share of this market, with its exclusive partnerships with legacy landline players like Avaya, Atos, and Alcatel, which effectively gives it a “hunting license” for about half of those 400 million legacy seats, leveraging joint go-to-market efforts with each partner. We remain confident that RingCentral is well positioned to achieve at least 30% top-line growth for years to come, along with steadily improving operating margins and free cash flow generation.”
Earlier this month, we published an article revealing that RingCentral Inc. (NYSE:RNG) stock was one of the Tiger Global’s top 10 stocks picks.
In Q1 2021, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on RingCentral Inc. (NYSE:RNG) stock decreased by about 19% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers don’t believe in RNG’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that RingCentral Inc. (NYSE:RNG) 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.
At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 10 best EV stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.