Here’s Why Mayar Capital Took Profits in Discovery Inc. (DISCK)

Mayar Capital, an investment management firm, published its first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 7.3% was delivered by the fund for the first quarter of 2021, outperforming the MSCI World Index that delivered a 4.9% return for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Mayar Capital, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Discovery, Inc. (NASDAQ: DISCK), and shared their insights on the company. Discovery, Inc. is a New York, New York-based mass media company that currently has a $14.5 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, DISCK delivered a 5.65% return, extending its 12-month gains to 36.10%. As of June 16, 2021, the stock closed at $28.65 per share.

Here is what Mayar Capital has to say about Discovery, Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“We also sold most of our holdings in Discovery as the stock price continued to increase to new highs. However, in late March the stock declined considerably when brokers liquidated holdings by Archegos Capital (see above in General Commentary) to satisfy margin calls. That brought the stock price down to levels that we found attractive, and we bought back a significant amount of the shares that we had sold earlier that month.”

Accidental Scientific Discoveries and Inventions Made by Mistake

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Our calculations show that Discovery, Inc. (NASDAQ: DISCK) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the first quarter of 2021, Discovery, Inc. was in 40 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 31 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. DISCK delivered a -56.52% 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.