Heartland Opportunistic Value Fund recently released its third-quarter investor letter – a copy of which is available for download here. The fund posted a return of 3.1% for the quarter, underperforming its benchmark, the Russell 3000 Value Index which returned 5.4% in the same quarter. You should check out Heartland’s top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of 2021.
In the Q3 2020 Investor Letter, Heartland Advisors highlighted a few stocks and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is one of them. Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is a technology company. Year-to-date, Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) stock lost 6.4% and on December 21st it had a closing price of $44.88. Here is what Heartland Advisors said:
“A handful of Information Technology (IT) names have been grabbing most of the investment headlines lately, however, as a whole, the sector has been a mixed bag from a performance standpoint. The Russel 3000® Value Index highlights the dynamic where the group ended the period mostly flat. Our holdings in the space outperformed marginally but also contained a key detractor, Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO).
Cisco, the world’s leading computer networking provider, was down for the period after revenues from its Products and Applications business lines weakened as IT departments postponed network spending in response to COVID-19. Sales from its security line were up roughly 14% but strength in the segment wasn’t large enough to offset weakness elsewhere. Impressively, they held operating margin on a 9% revenue decline.
Wall Street’s reaction to the weak results were mixed. Some credited the company for executing well in the face of an unprecedented macro pressure on its clients, while others cited results as an indicator that Cisco is struggling in its transformation from a predominantly hardware-oriented business to one that generates recurring-revenue through software and services.
The challenges faced by Cisco strike us as a temporary setback to what has been ongoing progress in its transition to a model that generates recurring revenue and is less tied to the IT spending cycle.
We believe the positive strides made in previous quarters will resume. With the recent setback, shares are trading at an attractive 12x earnings, while generating a nearly 4% dividend yield and a free cash flow/enterprise yield of nearly 10%.”
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Earlier this month, we published an article revealing that Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is one of the 10 best dividend-paying stocks to buy under $50.
In Q3 2020, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) stock remained unchanged from the previous quarter (see the chart here). Our calculations showed that Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) isn’t ranked among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 216% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 121 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. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
