5 52-Week Low Stocks with Upside Potential

2. Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) 

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 94

52-Week Low as of May 23: $40.73

Real-Time Share Price as of May 23: $42.98

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) is a diversified financial services firm. The company posted earnings for the first quarter of 2022 on April 14, reporting earnings per share of $0.88, beating analyst estimates by $0.07. The revenue over the period was $17.5 billion, down nearly 2.6% year-on-year. The firm attributed credit losses during the time to “the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the loan portfolios, as well as a decrease in net charge-offs”. On April 25, the firm declared a quarterly dividend of $0.25 per share. 

On April 18, Barclays analyst Jason Goldberg kept an Overweight rating on Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) stock and raised the price target to $64 from $62, appreciating the net interest income and loan growth outlook of the firm for 2022. 

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, 94 hedge funds in the database of Insider Monkey held stakes worth $6.11 billion in Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC), compared to 88 the preceding quarter worth $6.18 billion.

In its Q4 2021 investor letter, Davis Funds, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“The absolute level of revenues and profits generated by such companies is in fact so large that most of the major financial holdings in the portfolio produce enough annual operating income individually that a number of them could, in theory, purchase several entire businesses among hundreds of choices within the S&P 1500 Index, using just a year’s cash earnings without dipping into capital. This is theoretical, as financial companies would not be in the business of buying healthcare or technology companies, for example, but we point out these facts to illustrate the sheer scale of the economics produced by single financial companies in a given year, which is often a multiple of the cash earnings yielded by companies in a host of other industries.

Given this cash-generation power, we are naturally drawn to what we believe are strong and profitable financial institutions when the price is right. Presently, we believe the valuations of our financial holdings are not only reasonable, but extremely compelling, and our portfolio composition reflects this view. Representative financial holdings in the Fund includes Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC).”