Polen Capital Management, a value-driven, concentrated, long-term investment management firm, published its ‘Polen U.S. Small Company Growth’ fourth-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A gross return of 29.14% was recorded by the fund for the Q4 of 2020, slightly below its Russell 2000 Growth benchmark that delivered a 29.61% return. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Polen Capital Management, in their Q4 2020 investor letter, mentioned BlackLine, Inc. (NASDAQ: BL) and shared their insights on the company. BlackLine, Inc. is a California-based enterprise software company that currently has a $6.4 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, BL delivered a -17.28% return, while its 12-month gains are decently up by 121.55%. As of March 31, 2021, the stock closed at $108.4 per share.
Here is what Polen Capital Management has to say about BlackLine, Inc. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:
“In terms of individual holdings, Blackline was a top contributor during the quarter, based on relative contribution to return. Blackline was also a top contributor for the full year. Blackline is the leading provider of cloud-based financial close software globally. Although the pandemic disrupted many of its prospective customers and modestly delayed the sales cycle, it also highlighted the need for businesses to digitize ‘closing the books,’ or the financial close process. The company’s main competition is generally not other software providers but legacy processes that use Microsoft Excel. The pandemic has highlighted risks and inefficiencies in legacy systems for some, as many finance teams had to perform the financial close process remotely for the first time. We think this may drive CFOs to prioritize digitization, and we expect accelerated adoption of Blackline’s software going forward.”
Our calculations show that BlackLine, Inc. (NASDAQ: BL) 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, BlackLine, Inc. was in 23 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 17 funds in the third quarter. BL delivered a -17.09% 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.
