LRT Capital Management, an investment management firm, published its second-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of +29.68% was recorded by the LRT Economic Moat strategy for the Q2 of 2021, extending its 12-month returns to +42.18%. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of LRT Capital, the fund mentioned Texas Pacific Land Corporation (NYSE: TPL), and discussed its stance on the firm. Texas Pacific Land Corporation is a Dallas, Texas-based land and resource management and water services and operator, that currently has an $11.6 billion market capitalization. TPL delivered a 107.01% return since the beginning of the year, extending its 12-month returns to 155.08%. The stock closed at $1,504.99 per share on August 10, 2021.
Here is what LRT Capital has to say about Texas Pacific Land Corporation in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“Long time readers will know that we rarely invest in commodity businesses. However, there are periods in the market where commodity-based businesses outperform the broad indexes by a wide margin. Therefore, in order to have balance in the portfolio, we have long searched for a competitively advantaged company in the commodity space. We believe that Texas Pacific Land Trust (TPL), meets that criteria. Formed out of assets of formerly bankrupt railroads, TPL controls the largest acreage of land in the Permian basin – the center of the US shale oil industry. The company has two main sources of income: 1) royalties from oil & gas extracted on its properties – essentially a free call option on future oil prices and production; and 2) a water business which develops water resources and sells services to the fracking industry. We see TPL as an effective way to diversify the portfolio into a commodity exposed business that has a history of smart capital allocation and low risk of financial distress during periods of low oil prices. The company has no debt, and $281 million in cash.
The company uses most of its cash flows to pay dividends and repurchase shares. Shares are +106.17% year-to-date and +174.28% over the past twelve months.”
Based on our calculations, Texas Pacific Land Corporation (NYSE: TPL) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. TPL was in 17 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 11 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. Texas Pacific Land Corporation (NYSE: TPL) delivered a -10.89% 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.
