ClearBridge Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Large Cap Growth Strategy” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The ClearBridge Large Cap Growth Strategy underperformed its Russell 1000 Growth Index benchmark during the first quarter. On an absolute basis, the Strategy had gains across four of the eight sectors in which it was invested (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 Texas Instruments Incorporated (NASDAQ: TXN), and shared their insights on the company. Texas Instruments Incorporated is a Dallas, Texas-based semiconductor manufacturing company that currently has a $173.6 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, TXN delivered a 32.17% return, extending its 12-month gains to 197.00%. As of June 11, 2021, the stock closed at $188.67 per share.
Here is what ClearBridge Investments has to say about Texas Instruments Incorporated in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“Analog chipmaker Texas Instruments, meanwhile, benefited from better inventory management than peers. The main risk for semiconductors is short-term revenue pressure until capacity catches up with demand. Looking past current constraints, we expect the industry to see a strong second half and solid growth in 2022.”
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.