Ariel Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Ariel Fund”, “Ariel Appreciation Fund”, “Ariel Focus Fund”, “Ariel International Fund”, and “Ariel Global Fund” second-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 5.52% was recorded by Ariel Fund for the second quarter of 2021, 4.8% by Ariel Appreciation Fund, 4.0% by Ariel Focus Fund, 5.3% by Ariel International Fund, and 6.2% by Ariel Global Fund for the same period. 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, the fund highlighted a few stocks and Western Union Co (NYSE:WU) is one of them. Western Union Co (NYSE:WU) is a financial services company. In the last three months, Western Union Co (NYSE:WU) stock lost 10%. Here is what the fund said:
“The second largest detractor was the Western Union Company (WU) which fell -5.96%. The company recorded total revenue growth of only 2% in the quarter, disappointing Wall Street. However, their digital business increased +45%, boosting our optimism about accelerating future growth. With Western Union trading at a modest 11 times our estimate of next twelve-month earnings, we believe the company’s digital business is trading at a discount to intrinsic value.”
Pixabay/ Public Domain
In August, we published an article revealing that Western Union Co (NYSE:WU) was one of the 10 cheap dividend stocks that will help you retire before 40.
In Q1 2021, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Western Union Co (NYSE:WU) stock decreased by about 3% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers don’t believe in WU’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that Western Union Co (NYSE:WU) 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.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
