Third Avenue Management, a disciplined, value-oriented asset manager and investment fund, published its third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 10.94% was recorded by the fund for the 3rd Quarter of 2020, ahead of its FTSE EPRA NAREIT Developed benchmark that returned 10.32%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Third Avenue Management in their Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that they sold some shares of Lennar Corporation (NYSE: LEN) and used the earnings in acquiring a new investment position. Lennar Corporation is a homebuilder company that currently has a $23 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, LEN delivered a -9.55% return and settled at $76.59 per share at the closing of January 15th.
Here is what Third Avenue Management has to say about Lennar Corporation in their Investor Letter:
“During the period, the Fund reduced its exposure to the common stock of Lennar Corporation (but not the company’s class B shares—which are a larger holding in the Fund and inexplicably trade at more than a 20% discount to the class A shares despite equal economics).– The proceeds from this reduction was primarily used to fund a new investment position.
Third Avenue has long championed enterprises with sound business practices run by aligned control groups that exhibit strong stewardship. Within Third Avenue’s real estate strategy, this oftentimes leads the Fund to “pass” on investments in companies with uncertain environmental liabilities, business models that could be deemed predatory, and corporate governance structures that are stacked against key
stakeholders. Consequently, the select-set of real estate and real estate-related business that make it into the Third Avenue Real Estate Value Fund represent some of the true industry leaders in respect to their ESG practices, including Lennar Corp..”
Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Lennar Corporation (NYSE: LEN) was in 60 hedge funds’ portfolio, almost making to its all time high statistics of 66. Lennar Corporation proved its worth by giving a 21.40% return in the past 12 months.
As of September 2020, Third Avenue Management had a 698K share position in LEN that amounted to $45 million. This made Third Avenue Management a part of the top 10 hedge funds that holds most of LEN’s stake, just behind AQR Capital Management with $47 million worth of LEN shares, while Greenhaven Associates tops the list with $619 million. However, our calculations showed that Lennar Corporation (NYSE: LEN) isn’t ranked among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 216% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 121 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. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
