Is Denali Therapeutics Inc. (DNLI) A Smart Long-Term Buy?

Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron Health Care Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 0.58% was delivered by the fund’s institutional shares for the Q1 of 2021, below both its S&P 500 and Russell 3000 Health Care benchmarks that delivered a 6.17% and 2.14% returns respectively for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Baron Health Care Fund, in their Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Denali Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: DNLI), and shared their insights on the company. Denali Therapeutics Inc. is a South San Francisco, California-based biotechnology company that currently has a $7.4 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, DNLI delivered a -26.79% return, while its 12-month gains are up by 181.28%. As of April 29, 2021, the stock closed at $61.32 per share.

Here is what Baron Health Care Fund has to say about Denali Therapeutics Inc. in their Q1 2021 investor letter:

“Denali Therapeutics Inc. is a biotechnology company developing therapies for neurodegeneration, including both targeted drugs and delivery systems for crossing the blood/brain barrier. Shares fell in concert with the broader market rotation from growth to value that resulted in significant weakness in biotechnology stocks. From a fundamentals perspective, Denali reported incrementally positive updates from its Hunter Syndrome program in the quarter, although this development was more impactful in the prior quarter when initial data was released.”

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Our calculations show that Denali Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: DNLI) 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, Denali Therapeutics Inc. was in 20 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 24 funds in the third quarter. DNLI delivered a -10.48% 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.