Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron Discovery Fund” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A decline of 5.02% was delivered by the fund’s institutional shares for the third quarter of 2021, which was 0.63% better than the Russell 2000 Growth Index (the “Benchmark”). You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.
Baron Discovery Fund, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned indie Semiconductor, Inc. (NASDAQ: INDI) and discussed its stance on the firm. indie Semiconductor, Inc. is an Aliso Viejo, California-based technology company with a $2.1 billion market capitalization. INDI delivered a 17.70% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 53.15%. The stock closed at $15.56 per share on November 16, 2021.
Here is what Baron Funds has to say about indie Semiconductor, Inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:
“Indie Semiconductor, Inc. is a fabless designer, developer, and marketer of automotive semiconductors for automated driver assistance systems, user experience, and electrification applications. Indie leverages its cross-domain semiconductor expertise in analog, processing and power chips to integrate multiple chips and capabilities into a single package and offer its customers lower cost products in a smaller form-factor. Indie has strong market share in applications such as Apple CarPlay and ultrasonic parking assist with multiple contracts ramping in the coming quarters in applications such as advanced lighting controls, telematics, and electrification. The stock rose on increasing investor recognition of the longer-term opportunity for the company, especially in light of the current automotive semiconductor supply shortage. Semiconductor content in cars is expected to grow substantially over the coming decade as automated safety features and electrification penetrate an increasing percentage of vehicles.”
Photo by Umberto on Unsplash
Based on our calculations, indie Semiconductor, Inc. (NASDAQ: INDI) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. INDI was in 10 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 0 funds in the previous quarter. indie Semiconductor, Inc. (NASDAQ: INDI) delivered a 74.44% 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.
