Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Small Cap Fund’ fourth quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of -6.99% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTSX, -6.93% by its Advisor Class: APDSX, and -6.93% by its Institutional Class: APHSX for the fourth quarter of 2021, all below the Russell 2000® Growth Index that delivered a 0.01% return and the Russell 2000® Index that was up by 2.14% for the same period. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.
Artisan Small Cap Fund, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Workiva Inc. (NYSE: WK) and discussed its stance on the firm. Workiva Inc. is an Ames, Iowa-based global software-as-a-service company with a $5.1 billion market capitalization. WK delivered a -23.62% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by -0.78%. The stock closed at $99.67 per share on February 24, 2022.
Here is what Artisan Small Cap Fund has to say about Workiva Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:
“Workiva is a leading provider of cloud software for financial reporting with approximately 70% of its business tied to SEC reporting through its core Wdesk offering. Over the past decade, the SEC has phased in requirements for companies to file their financials using an XBRL datatagging format. XBRL is a standard for tagging business and financial reports to increase the transparency and accessibility of business information by using a uniform format. This regulatory change has enabled Workiva to disrupt and capture significant market share from traditional printing vendors including RR Donnelly & Merrill. In late 2019, the company completed a multi-year investment cycle which enabled it to debut a new, modern technology platform allowing the company to incubate new ideas, see new regulations and introduce use cases in a matter of weeks/months instead of multiple years, with FERC reporting being a good example of this most recently. In addition to the rollout of these new use cases, we believe the company can expand its international footprint. Business outside of North America is small (~8% of revenue in 2020), and its recent investments to expand its international sales presence should position it ahead of a European mandate requiring 5,000 companies to begin using XBRL tagging starting in January 2022 (vs. ~500 companies who have adopted Wdesk in EMEA today). Finally, the company also has the potential to benefit from the ramp-up of ESG regulatory reporting longer term. The company has spent over a decade building an engine for SEC reporting and can repurpose this platform for compiling metrics including GHG emissions, labor requirements, conflict minerals and other ESG-related KPIs.”
Photo by Danial Igdery on Unsplash
Our calculations show that Workiva Inc. (NYSE: WK) failed to obtain a mark on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. WK was in 29 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 23 funds in the previous quarter. Workiva Inc. (NYSE: WK) delivered a -28.57% return in the past 3 months.
In September 2021, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on WK in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
