Third Point LLC, an investment management firm, published its fourth-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A net return of 16.1% was recorded by the fund for the Q4 of 2020, outperforming all its S&P 500, MSCI WORLD, and CS HF Event-Driven benchmark that delivered a 12.1%, 14.1% and 10.4% return respectively. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Third Point, in their Q4 2020 Investor Letter, said that Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) has an urgent need to address its “brain drain” of engineering talent that contributes to its dramatic underperformance. Intel Corporation is a semiconductor company that currently has a $256 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, INTC delivered a decent 36.8% return and settled at $63.01 per share at the closing of February 19th.
Here is what Third Point has to say about Intel Corporation in their Q4 2020 investor letter:
“After building a significant stake in Intel in Q4, we sent a letter on December 29th to Intel’s Board Chairman, Omar Ishrak. We shared our views regarding Intel’s dramatic underperformance and suggested certain steps the company could take to remedy a rapidly deteriorating outlook. We highlighted an urgent need for Intel to address its “brain drain” of engineering talent, the chief cause of the manufacturing and design deficiencies that have led to its declining market share.
Shortly after our note and engagement with the company, Intel announced it was bringing back Pat Gelsinger as its new CEO. Gelsinger is a respected engineer and manager who previously spent 30 years of his career working closely with Intel’s legendary founders during the company’s best days. With a background in electrical engineering and prior roles such as head of Intel’s digital enterprise group, desktop products group, and Intel Labs, and as the company’s first CTO, Gelsinger has the deep technical expertise needed to address Intel’s current execution issues. He also has a history of success in reinvigorating major organizations. During his eight-year tenure as CEO of VMWare, he put the on-premise company on a path to the hybrid cloud and positioned it for several years of growth ahead.
Equally important, while Gelsinger is a respected engineer, he is also widely lauded as a manager of engineers. It is hard to think of a better person to motivate and inspire the best of Intel’s thousands of brilliant employees who will help build the company’s future.
Once Gelsinger has successfully regained Intel’s position as the premier microprocessor vendor in the world, we believe the opportunity for additional shareholder value creation is enormous. The semiconductor compute TAM is over $100 billion, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, and other architectures, and growth is increasingly driven by unstoppable trends like cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Intel’s human, financial, and intellectual property resources are unmatched in the semiconductor industry. The ability to leverage those resources in order to better capture the full unbounded growth of this market opportunity set makes us excited to be long-term shareholders.”
![](https://imonkey-blog.imgix.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/21030334/Intel-Corporation.jpg?auto=fortmat&fit=clip&expires=1756080000&width=480&height=357)
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INTC delivered a 2.02% return in the past 12 months. Our calculations show that Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) does not belong in our list of 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. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.