Is Generac Holdings (GNRC) A Smart Long-Term Buy?

Artisan Partners Limited Partnership, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Mid Cap Fund’ fourth quarter 2020 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 16.82% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTMX, 16.87% by its Advisor Class: APDMX, and 16.89% by its Institutional Class: APHMX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, all below its Russell Midcap Growth Benchmark that delivered a 19.02% return and its Russel Midcap Index that was up by 19.91% in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Artisan Mid Cap Fund, in their Q4 2020 investor letter, mentioned Generac Holdings Inc. (NYSE: GNRC) and emphasized their views on the company. Generac Holdings Inc. is a Wisconsin-based manufacturing company that currently has a $19.9 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, GNRC delivered a 39.18% return, impressively extending its 12-month gains to 257.53%. As of March 17, 2021, the stock closed at $316.52 per share.

Here is what Artisan Mid Cap Fund has to say about Generac Holdings Inc. in their Q4 2020 investor letter:

“We have been building our position in Generac, a provider of residential backup generators in the US with a dominant market position. We believe the company is in the early stages of a period of elevated growth as climate change leads to more frequent and severe natural disasters—hurricanes, floods and wildfires. This was on full display in its recently reported results: Orders for its home standby generators were up 2.5X YOY, order backlogs were at record highs, and management indicated it is investing in expanding its production capacity by ~70%-80% by the second half of 2021. In addition, we believe the company’s acquisitions and investments in the area of solar battery backup systems represent a new profit-cycle driver as the company’s scale, distribution network and differentiated go-to-market strategy will help it gain a foothold in this industry.”

Our calculations show that Generac Holdings Inc. (NYSE: GNRC) 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, Generac Holdings Inc. was in 32 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 43 funds in the third quarter. GNRC delivered a decent 43.59% 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.