Cooper Investors, an investment management firm, published its “Cooper Investors Global Equities Fund (Hedged)” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. For the rolling three months to one year, the Fund returned 5.7% and 28.24% respectively, while its benchmark, by comparison, returned -0.42% and 26.57% over the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.
Cooper Investors, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX) and discussed its stance on the firm. Baxter International Inc. is a Deerfield, Illinois-based health care company with a $39.8 billion market capitalization. BAX delivered a -0.70% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by -2.52%. The stock closed at $79.68 per share on October 19, 2021.
Here is what Cooper Investors has to say about Baxter International Inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“During the quarter we exited our position in Baxter, having originally bought in 2017 as a Low Risk Turnaround with clear Stalwart attributes. In essence, the core businesses were highly durable, providing life sustaining or saving medical products such as IV medication or pumps and dialysis machines.
They had been mismanaged prior to the company spinning off its biopharmaceutical business in 2015 which had generated most of the Baxter’s operating profit. With a new CEO in Joe Almeida, who came with a successful track record leading another medical device company (Covidien) we identified three sources of value latency for the new standalone Baxter.
Firstly, optimising the cost structure. Baxter were successful here – they were able to effectively double operating margins from low single digits to mid-to-high teens over a relatively short four-year period. Secondly, accelerating sales growth through a more focused R&D effort. This is inherently more difficult than cost optimisation and on this front success has been muted with only moderate impact to revenues from new product introductions. Finally, capital deployment through Baxter’s significantly under-levered balance sheet. Several smaller bolt-on acquisitions were nicely complementary to the existing portfolio, but in early September the company announced the acquisition of Hil-Rom Holdings, a medical device company with leading positions in bed systems and patient monitoring. The deal is significant at US$12.5bn in size, and exhausts all balance sheet latency in one fell swoop.
Whilst it is “EPS accretive” we believe the high single digit ROIC management are targeting over five years is most reflective of the financial merits of the deal. Put another way, despite visions of providing digital and connected healthcare (think a Baxter IV pump combined with a Hil-Rom smart bed), ultimately the combined entity will likely remain a low-to-mid-single digit grower. Baxter look like they are getting bigger but not necessarily better.
This combination of uncertainty around the merits of the Hil-Rom acquisition and the underwhelming performance on the product development side of the business led us to conclude that the investment proposition today is less attractive relative to other opportunities.”
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Based on our calculations, Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. BAX was in 46 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 40 funds in the previous quarter. Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX) delivered a -0.74% 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.
