Polen Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Polen Focus Growth” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly gross return of 2.78% was delivered by the fund for the third quarter of 2021, outperforming both its Russell 1000 Growth benchmark that delivered a 1.16% return, and the S&P 500 Index that had a 0.59% gain 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.
Polen Capital, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM) and discussed its stance on the firm. salesforce.com, inc. is a San Francisco, California-based software company with a $286.4 billion market capitalization. CRM delivered a 31.99% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 21.38%. The stock closed at $293.73 per share on October 22, 2021.
Here is what Polen Capital has to say about salesforce.com, inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“Salesforce came under pressure earlier in the year after agreeing to purchase Slack for about $26 billion. Since then, management has articulated well the strategic rationale and integration of Slack into its other software offerings and has demonstrated continued double-digit organic revenue growth within its legacy product offerings. At its recent investor day, the company also outlined long-term growth plans in line with our estimates but probably above what others may have been expecting, especially on margin expansion.”
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Based on our calculations, salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM) ranks 15th in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. CRM was in 108 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 91 funds in the previous quarter. salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM) delivered an 18.62% 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.
