Polen Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Polen International Growth” second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 5.57% was delivered by the fund for the Q2 of 2021, outperforming its MSCI All Country World benchmark that delivered a 5.47% return for the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Polen Capital, the fund mentioned ASML Holding N.V. (NASDAQ: ASML) and discussed its stance on the firm. ASML Holding N.V. is a Veldhoven, Netherlands-based semiconductor company with a $332.7 billion market capitalization. ASML delivered a 66.27% return since the beginning of the year, extending its 12-month returns to 113.70%. The stock closed at $810.94 per share on August 26, 2021.
Here is what Polen Capital has to say about ASML Holding N.V. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“Dutch technology company ASML is the world’s only supplier of photolithography systems to leading-edge semiconductor manufacturers. It is a gross simplification and a valid point to note that ASML’s technology enables the computing technology we use today. For years, ASML engineers bent the laws of physics and enabled Moore’s Law—which states that computer chips will become faster and cost less—to progress.
Incremental innovation gains mushroomed with the rollout of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) technology. We were impressed by management’s recent acknowledgment that demand for ASML’s lithography systems is exceeding their prior expectations. Recent announcements by management and major customers for ASML give us even more confidence in the sustainability of growth. We believe ASML could grow its earnings at a high-teens rate over the coming five years.”
Photo by Hack Capital on Unsplash
Based on our calculations, ASML Holding N.V. (NASDAQ: ASML) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. ASML was in 44 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 35 funds in the previous quarter. ASML Holding N.V. (NASDAQ: ASML) delivered a 20.06% return in the past 3 months.
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.
