Air Lease Corp (AL) & Ryman Hospitality Properties Inc (RHP) Among Bernard Selz’s Top Small-Cap Stock Picks

Bernard Selz‘s Selz Capital has disclosed its first-quarter holdings in a 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bernard Selz founded New York-based Selz Capital in 2003 and the fund currently has nearly $600 million in its equity portfolio. The fund invests in consumer discretionary, energy, healthcare, and transportation. Selz’s latest 13F filing revealed some interesting moves, such as a new position in Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), but also showed a large increase in exposure to some small-cap stocks. In this article we will take a look at Bernard Selz’s top small-cap picks which are Air Lease Corp (NYSE:AL), Ryman Hospitality Properties Inc (NYSE:RHP), and Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc (NASDAQ:SBGI).

The small-cap picks of Selz Capital (and other funds from our database) are of a particular interest to us because they align with our strategy. Through a series of backtests, we determined that the 15 most popular small-cap picks among hedge funds can outperform the S&P 500 Total Return Index by nearly one percentage point per month (read more details about the results of our backtests). In addition, these stocks delivered a monthly alpha of 80 basis points in those backtests. Furthermore, since we started following these top small-cap ideas in real-time, this system has posted returns of more than 135%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by around 80 percentage points.

Selz owned 944,900 shares of Air Lease Corp (NYSE:AL) valued at $35.66 million, the stake being increased by 80% during the first quarter, a period during which the stock advanced by more than 10%. Air Lease Corp (NYSE:AL) is expected to release its financial results tomorrow and analysts expect a year-over-year growth in EPS, to $0.60, and revenue, to $274.98 million. Among the funds we track, several investors disclosed big positions in Air Lease Corp (NYSE:AL), including John Osterweis’ Osterweis Capital and Dinakar Singh’s TPG-Axon.