Is Pacific Biosciences of California (PACB) A Good Investment Choice?

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 Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (NASDAQ: PACB), and shared their insights on the company. Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. is a Menlo Park, California-based biotechnology company that currently has a $6.2 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, PACB delivered a 25.56% return, impressively extending its 12-month gains to 885.48%. As of April 28, 2021, the stock closed at $33.63 per share.

Here is what Baron Health Care Fund has to say about Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. in their Q1 2021 investor letter:

“Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. provides long-read DNA sequencing systems to scientists conducting genetic analysis. Shares performed well for the quarter. We believe there is increasing excitement about the potential for its platform to move beyond research into clinical applications. The recently appointed CEO was previously Chief Commercial Officer at Illumina, and we think he is well qualified to commercially execute on Pacific Biosciences’ differentiated long-read platform.”

Our calculations show that Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (NASDAQ: PACB) 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, Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. was in 23 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 25 funds in the third quarter. PACB delivered a -4.99% 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.