Artisan Partners Limited Partnership, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan International Fund’ fourth quarter 2020 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 8.87% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTIX, 8.90% by its Advisor Class: APDIX, and 8.92% by its Institutional Class: APHIX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, all below its MSCI EAFE benchmark that delivered a 16.05% return and its MSCI All Country World Index that was up by 17.01% in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Artisan International Fund, in their Q4 2020 investor letter, mentioned NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) and emphasized their views on the company. NICE Ltd. is an Israel-based software solutions company that currently has a $14.7 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, NICE delivered a -18.75% return, but its 12-month gains are still up by 96.13%. As of March 16, 2021, the stock closed at $230.39 per share.
Here is what Artisan International Fund has to say about NICE Ltd. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:
“NICE is an Israeli software company that provides software for call centers, which combines omnichannel routing of customer inquiries (e.g., voice, text, email, social media) with analytics/AI, workforce management and robotic process automation (RPA). NICE has best-inclass software across each of these software categories and has a strong value proposition of both improving the customer experience of call center interactions while simultaneously reducing operating costs through automation, intelligence and flexibility. We believe the company should benefit from the ongoing transition to cloud computing, contributing to increased adoption of its analytics and AI solutions.”
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Our calculations show that NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, NICE Ltd. was in 26 hedge fund portfolios. NICE delivered a -10.03% return in the past 3 months.
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.