Polen Capital, an investment management company, released its “Polen Focus Growth Strategy” third-quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. September saw another duration-driven sell-off in equities similar to what the market witnessed in 4Q 2021 and parts of 2022, but Performance for July-August was meaningfully different from September. In the quarter, the fund fell -3.28% and -3.47%, gross and net of fees, roughly in line with the -3.13% and -3.27% returns of the Russell 1000 Growth and S&P 500 indexes, respectively. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy highlighted stocks like Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) in the third quarter 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in San Diego, California, Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) is a life science tools and integrated systems manufacturer. On November 3, 2023, Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) stock closed at $116.92 per share. One-month return of Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) was -15.15%, and its shares lost 46.17% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) has a market capitalization of $18.508 billion.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy made the following comment about Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) in its Q3 2023 investor letter:
“Several issues have hampered Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) over the last few years, including a regulator penalizing it for closing an acquisition without approval and the subsequent dilution of the acquisition. In addition, the core business has slowed meaningfully due to macroeconomic pressure on their research customers, and they have lost some senior members of their management team, including their former CEO Francis DeSouza.
These issues are all clearly negative, but for balance, we believe most of these issues have been or soon will be rectified. Illumina has already hired a new operations-focused CEO, Jacob Thaysen from Agilent Technologies, with a strong track record of execution in this industry. Thaysen arrives as the company has recently launched its next-generation genomic sequencing products that should help re-ignite growth in the core business. The divestiture of Grail should be imminent, which would end the substantial shareholder dilution from Grail and allow the healthy operating margins of Illumina’s core business to become more visible. While we would prefer for Illumina to be allowed to own and optimally run Grail, this seems highly unlikely now based on European regulatory concerns. That said, we are looking forward to getting back to owning the strong core business.”
science photo/Shutterstock.com
Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 43 hedge fund portfolios held Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) at the end of second quarter which was 44 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) in another article and shared Ensemble Capital Management’s views on the company. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q3 2023 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
