ClearBridge Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Large Cap Growth Strategy” second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The ClearBridge Large Cap Growth Strategy underperformed its Russell 1000 Growth Index benchmark during the second quarter. On an absolute basis, the Strategy had gains across seven of the eight sectors in which it was invested (out of 11 sectors total). The leading contributors to performance were in the IT sector. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of ClearBridge Investments, the fund mentioned UiPath Inc. (NYSE: PATH), and discussed its stance on the firm. UiPath Inc. is a New York, New York-based software company, that currently has a $30.4 billion market capitalization. PATH delivered a -14.63% return in the past month, and it closed at $61.99 per share on July 14, 2021.
Here is what ClearBridge Investments has to say about UiPath Inc. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“We participated in the IPO of UiPath, a developer of software for robotic process automation that uses AI, natural language processing and design to streamline complex processes across a variety of technology environments. The company is an industry leader with a superior solution for leveraging software to optimize workloads. Organizations around the world are beginning to understand the power of automation, with momentum picking up toward fully automating business processes, a $60 billion market today that could grow to $200 billion or more by 2030. UiPath has a unique pricing model, broad partner ecosystem and thoughtful management team supporting one of the strongest growth profiles in technology. Risks we are watching include a partial cloud transition ahead and increased competition from larger software platforms over time.”
Based on our calculations, UiPath Inc. (NYSE: PATH) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. PATH delivered a -12.69% return in the past 5 days.
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.
