Is BlackLine Inc. (BL) A Smart Long-Term Buy?

Artisan Partners Limited Partnership, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Global Discovery Fund’ fourth quarter 2020 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 16.95% was recorded by its Investor Class: APFDX, 17% by its Advisor Class: APDDX, and 17.05% by its Institutional Class: APHDX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, outperforming its MSCI All Country World benchmark that delivered a 14.68% return in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Artisan Global Discovery Fund, in their Q4 2020 investor letter, mentioned BlackLine, Inc. (NASDAQ: BL) and emphasized their views on the company. BlackLine, Inc. is a California-based enterprise software company that currently has a $6.6 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, BL delivered a -15.23% return, but its 12-month gains are still up by 166.80%. As of March 15, 2021, the stock closed at $113.77 per share.

Here is what Artisan Global Discovery Fund has to say about BlackLine, Inc. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:

“Turning to individual securities, among our top Q4 individual contributors was Blackline. Blackline develops cloud-based accounting software that helps businesses improve and automate complex, manual and repetitive accounting processes. The company has been delivering solid results, upselling existing customers and landing new accounts. We believe the growth runway remains compelling as its solutions can lead to cost savings, enhance real-time visibility and improve data integrity.”

Our calculations show that BlackLine, Inc. (NASDAQ: BL) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, BlackLine, Inc. was in 23 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 17 funds in the third quarter. BL delivered a -11.45% 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.