Polen Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Polen U.S. SMID Company Growth Composite” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 2.35% was delivered by the fund for the first quarter of 2021, trailing its Russell 2500 Growth benchmark that delivered a 2.49% gain for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Polen Capital, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Pool Corporation (NASDAQ: POOL), and shared their insights on the company. Pool Corporation is a Covington, Louisiana-based swimming pool supplies, equipment and related leisure products distributor that currently has a $17.2 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, POOL delivered a 15.34% return, extending its 12-month gains to 68.83%. As of May 26, 2021, the stock closed at $429.63 per share.
Here is what Polen Capital has to say about Pool Corporation in its Q1 2021 investor letter:
“During the quarter, we exited our position in Pool Corp. to redeploy the assets in areas that we believe offer a more attractive risk/return profile. Pool Corp. was a subscale position in the strategy after underperforming over the past year. The company’s results remain attractive, and the pool industry demand remains healthy as trends such as rising pool ownership, more pool usage, and investment in outdoor living have accelerated as a result of the pandemic.
That said, after reporting much better than expected results in 2020, we think 2021 could be a more challenging year for the
company with the potential for changing consumer behavior as pandemic conditions improve.”
Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock.com
Our calculations show that Pool Corporation (NASDAQ: POOL) 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, Pool Corporation was in 41 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 33 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. POOL delivered a 30.83% return in the past 3 months.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 231.2% between 2015 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 126 percentage points. We know it sounds unbelievable. You have been dismissing our articles about top hedge fund stocks mostly because you were fed biased information by other media outlets about hedge funds’ poor performance. You could have doubled the size of your nest egg by investing in the top hedge fund stocks instead of dumb S&P 500 ETFs. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
