Is Barrick Gold (GOLD) A Good Stock To Buy Now?

Ariel Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Ariel Fund”, “Ariel Appreciation Fund”, “Ariel Focus Fund”, “Ariel International Fund”, and “Ariel Global Fund” second-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 5.52% was recorded by Ariel Fund for the second quarter of 2021, 4.8% by Ariel Appreciation Fund, 4.0% by  Ariel Focus Fund, 5.3% by Ariel International Fund, and 6.2% by Ariel Global Fund for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

In the Q2 2021 Investor Letter, the fund highlighted a few stocks and Barrick Gold Corp (NYSE:GOLD) is one of them. Barrick Gold Corp (NYSE:GOLD) is a mining company that produces gold and copper with 16 operating sites in 13 countries. In the last three months, Barrick Gold Corp (NYSE:GOLD) stock lost 13%. Here is what the fund said:

“We re-initiated a position in Barrick Gold Corp. (GOLD) in the quarter. Its shares fell -5.56% from our initiation to the end of the quarter as the price of gold trended lower. Gold exceeded $2,000 per ounce in 2020 but has since declined to approximately $1,812 per ounce. Barrick’s shares have often traded at elevated PE multiples. However, at the current reduced stock price, it is trading at a PE multiple of only 16 times next year’s earnings, an attractive opportunity in our opinion, given our expectation of higher inflation and gold’s historic role as an inflationary hedge.”

Earlier this month, we published an article revealing that Barrick Gold Corp (NYSE:GOLD) was one of the 10 stocks Stanley Druckenmiller is dumping.

In Q1 2021, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Barrick Gold Corp (NYSE:GOLD) stock decreased by about 8% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers don’t believe in GOLD’s growth potential. Our calculations showed that Barrick Gold Corp (NYSE:GOLD) isn’t ranked among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.

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.