Wasatch Advisors, an employee-owned investment manager, published its ‘Wasatch Small Cap Value Fund’ third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 4.48% was recorded by the fund for the Q3 of 2020, above its Russel 2000 Value benchmark that returned 2.56%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Wasatch Advisors, in their Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that they encountered a significant underperformance with Monro, Inc. (NASDAQ: MNRO), but accordingly, the lowest of low was already reached and now, there’s no other way but up that is why they maintained their position in the company. Monro, Inc. is an automotive repair and maintenance company that currently has a $2 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, Monro, Inc. delivered a 46.88% return and settled at $59.87 per share at the closing of January 15th.
Here is what Wasatch Advisors has to say about Monro, Inc. in their Investor Letter:
“Consumer discretionary was the only sector in which the Fund experienced significant underperformance relative to the benchmark. The shortfall was primarily the result of an investment in auto-services company Monro, Inc. (MNRO), which remained under pressure from the effects of Covid-19. We maintained the position, as we believe the pandemic has prompted the company to accelerate making necessary changes to its business, such as closing unprofitable stores and implementing labor-saving software.”
Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Monro, Inc. (NASDAQ: MNRO) was in 14 hedge fund portfolios. Its all time high statistics is 18. MNRO delivered a 13.32% return YTD.
As of September 2020, Wasatch Advisors had a 4.4 million share position in MNRO that amounted to $181.8 million. However, our calculations showed that Monro, Inc. (NASDAQ: MNRO) does not belong to the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 216% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 121 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. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds
At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 10 most profitable companies in the world to pick the best large-cap stocks to buy. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our website.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.