Carillon Tower Advisers is Bullish Pinterest (PINS), Here’s Why

Carillon Tower Advisers, an investment management firm, published its “Carillon Eagle Mid Cap Growth Fund” third quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The Russell Midcap® Growth Index (down 0.76%) marginally outperformed its Russell Midcap® Value Index (down 1.01%) counterpart. Individual sectors across the Russell Midcap Growth were largely mixed, with financials (up 6.83%), real estate (up 4.05%), and information technology (up 2.15%) leading the way. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their best picks for 2021.

Carillon Tower Advisers, in its Q3 2021 investor letter, mentioned Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE: PINS) and discussed its stance on the firm. Pinterest, Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based Social networking service with a $31.1 billion market capitalization. PINS delivered a -29.86% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by -19.97%. The stock closed at $46.22 per share on November 5, 2021.

Here is what Carillon Tower Advisers has to say about Pinterest, Inc. in its Q3 2021 investor letter:

Pinterest operates a pinboard-style social media website that enables users to create theme-based image collections for events, hobbies, and other personal interests. Despite a quarterly report that displayed solid revenue and profitability versus expectations, the stock was pressured as user engagement metrics decreased as the world reopened post-pandemic. We believe the company can continue to drive growth in the face of this headwind by increasing the number of advertisers, adding engaging video content, and ramping ecommerce capabilities.”

Based on our calculations, Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE: PINS) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. PINS was in 63 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 83 funds in the previous quarter. Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE: PINS) delivered a -21.46% 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.