Clark Street Value: “Accel Entertainment (ACEL) is the Best Part of Regional Casinos”

Clark Street Value, an investment management firm, published its fourth-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be seen here. An annual portfolio return of 74.99% was recorded by the fund for the year 2021, versus 28.71% for the S&P 500, and an IRR since the inception of 29.12%.  over the same period. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.

Clark Street Value, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Accel Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: ACEL) and discussed its stance on the firm. Accel Entertainment, Inc. is a Burr Ridge, Illinois-based gaming-as-a-service provider with a $1.1 billion market capitalization. ACEL delivered a -2.76% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 18.32%. The stock closed at $12.66 per share on January 12, 2022.

Here is what Clark Street Value has to say about Accel Entertainment, Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:

“Accel Entertainment (ACEL) is the best part of regional casinos, the slot machines without the worst part, all the capex and lease payments.  Their acquisition of Century Gaming unfortunately didn’t close this year, to me it sounded like a management misstep or unfamiliarity with cross state border acquisitions.  But ACEL announced a big buyback ($200MM on a $1.2B market cap), it trades at roughly 8x EBITDA proforma for the acquisition, wage inflation should put more discretionary dollars in their client’s pockets, a few more states are talking about legalizing VGTs, the shares seem pretty cheap to me.”

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Our calculations show that Accel Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: ACEL) failed to obtain a mark in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. ACEL was in 12 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2021, compared to 10 funds in the previous quarter. (NYSE: ACEL) delivered a 5.50% return in the past 3 months.

In January 2021, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on ACEL in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.