Cooper Investors, an investment management firm, published its “Cooper Investors Global Equities Fund (Hedged)” second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. For the 3 months and 12 months to June 30th, the Fund returned 7.97% and 32.87% respectively, while its benchmark, by comparison returned 7.05% and 35.32% over the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Cooper Investors, the fund mentioned RELX PLC (NYSE: RELX), and discussed its stance on the firm. RELX PLC is a London, United Kingdom-based book publishing company, that currently has a $57.6 billion market capitalization. RELX delivered a 20.92% return since the beginning of the year, extending its 12-month returns to 34.57%. The stock closed at $29.82 per share on August 06, 2021.
Here is what Cooper Investors has to say about RELX PLC in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“As noted in our previous update stock numbers in the Fund had become temporarily elevated due to participation in a number of spin-off and IPO opportunities. This has reduced back to 42 positions after three stocks were sold during the quarter with proceeds used to upsize recent investments, these sells (includes) RELX.
RELX, an owner of highly recurring subscription journals and data assets has been owned in the portfolio for nearly 5 years and delivered a solid risk adjusted total return of over 70% (in local currency terms). During the period of ownership management have simplified the corporate structure and continued to deploy capital into faster growing data assets, mainly in the US. Shares were punished in 2020 as the group’s Exhibition business suffered a material drop in earnings due to restrictions preventing physical events taking place. After a decent recovery in the share price this year we have redeployed what was a smaller Stalwart position into superior VoF propositions.”
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Based on our calculations, RELX PLC (NYSE: RELX) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. RELX was in 4 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 8 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. RELX PLC (NYSE: RELX) delivered an 11.48% 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.
At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, pet market is growing at a 7% annual rate and is expected to reach $110 billion in 2021. So, we are checking out the 5 best stocks for animal lovers. We go through lists like the 10 best battery stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
