Should You Also Dispose Your Splunk (SPLK) Position?

ClearBridge Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Select Strategy” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The ClearBridge Select Strategy slightly underperformed its Russell 3000 Index benchmark in the first quarter. On an absolute basis, the Strategy had gains across nine of the 10 sectors in which it was invested during the quarter (out of 11 sectors total) You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

ClearBridge Investments, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK), and shared their insights on the company. Splunk Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based software company that currently has an $18.4 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, SPLK delivered a -33.83% return, while its 12-month gains are down by -39.67%. As of June 04, 2021, the stock closed at $112.41 per share.

Here is what ClearBridge Investments has to say about Splunk Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“In addition to the new issue market, we have been tactically adding growth exposure. To make room for these new names with more attractive outlooks related to the reopening, we sold out of companies where the thesis is not playing out at the pace we expected including Splunk.”

Software

Our calculations show that Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the first quarter of 2021, Splunk Inc. was in 41 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 47 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. SPLK delivered a -14.21% 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.