ClearBridge Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Sustainability Leaders Strategy” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The ClearBridge Sustainability Leaders Strategy underperformed its Russell 3000 Index benchmark during the first quarter. On an absolute basis, the Strategy had gains in five of 10 sectors in which it was invested (out of 11 sectors total). You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
ClearBridge Investments, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM), and shared their insights on the company. salesforce.com, inc. is a San Francisco, California-based software company that currently has a $219.9 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, CRM delivered a 6.72% return, while its 12-month gains are up by 36.58%. As of June 04, 2021, the stock closed at $237.48 per share.
Here is what ClearBridge Investments has to say about salesforce.com, inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“We added to our software-as-a-service (SaaS) exposure with the initiation of SaaS leader salesforce.com, which develops software for customer relationship management (we added Workday, which enterprise resource planning applications, last quarter). Saleforce.com is well-positioned in the most attractive end markets in software and will benefit from secular drivers such as remote work and the digital transformation. Salesforce.com is a sustainability leader as well, with a commitment to carbon-neutral cloud, toward which it has set a goal of 100% renewable energy for global operations by fiscal year 2022. The company has a strong focus on equality, in terms of equal rights, pay, education and opportunity. As a data company it has been leading on workforce disclosures and seeks to have 50% of its U.S. workforce made up of underrepresented groups by 2024.”
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Our calculations show that salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM) ranks 27th in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the first quarter of 2021, salesforce.com, inc. was in 91 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 97 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. CRM delivered a 12.68% return in the past 3 months.
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.
