Polen Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Polen U.S. SMID Company Growth Fund” second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly gross return of 12.02% was delivered by the fund for the second quarter of 2021, outperforming its Russell 2500 Growth benchmark that delivered a 6.04% gain for the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Polen Capital, the fund mentioned The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTD) and discussed its stance on the firm. The Trade Desk, Inc. is a California, United States-based software company with a $36.4 billion market capitalization. TTD delivered a -4.99% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 72.46%. The stock closed at $78.20 per share on September 3, 2021.
Here is what Polen Capital has to say about The Trade Desk, Inc. in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“On a securities level, our top contributors (includes) The Trade Desk. All these businesses performed well fundamentally. The Trade Desk, which operates the largest independent programmatic advertising platform, has experienced volatility based on announcements from Google on some of its internet tracking and cookie policies. Google recently announced a deferral of those changes.”
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Based on our calculations, The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTD) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. TTD was in 25 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 35 funds in the previous quarter. The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTD) delivered a 26.60% return in the past 3 months.
Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ small-cap stock picks managed to beat the market by double digits annually between 1999 and 2016, but the margin of outperformance has been declining in recent years. Nevertheless, we were still able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that underperformed the market by 10 percentage points annually between 2006 and 2017. Interestingly the margin of underperformance of these stocks has been increasing in recent years. Investors who are long the market and short these stocks would have returned more than 27% annually between 2015 and 2017. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 in our quarterly newsletter.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
