Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its “Artisan Value Fund” fourth quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 4.48% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTLX, 4.55% by its Advisor Class: APDLX, and 4.54% was gained by its Institutional Class: APHLX for the fourth quarter of 2021, all below the Russell 1000® Value Index that delivered a 7.77% return, and the Russell 1000® Index that gained 9.78% for the same period. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.
Artisan Value Fund, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) and discussed its stance on the firm. Visa Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based financial services company with a $471.8 billion market capitalization. V delivered a 1.18% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by 3.24%. The stock closed at $219.27 per share on February 25, 2022.
Here is what Artisan Value Fund has to say about Visa Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:
“We initiated two new positions in Q4, adding Visa. Visa is a global payments company and is one of the four major US credit card networks (along with Mastercard, American Express and Discover). Visa is accepted at over 80 million merchant locations in 200 countries, interacts with 15 thousand financial institutions and processed 165 billion transactions with $13 trillion of payments and cash volume in the 12-month period ending September 2021. We have always admired Visa’s business, but its valuation prevented it from getting over the hurdle and into the portfolio. As of late, the stock has been caught up in indiscriminate selling as part of a larger unwind trade in a richly valued fintech space. Concerns also exist about Visa’s slowdown in cross-border transactions due to COVID and its net-revenue sharing arrangements with Amazon. This created an opportunity to purchase a very highquality business that benefits from substantial barriers to entry, network effects and several structural growth drivers, including consumer spending growth, the shift from cash to card, increasing ecommerce penetration, market share growth and global expansion. We believe Visa has a long runway for revenue growth as cash and checks continue to lose share. Consumers can’t use cash and checks online, after all. From a “safer” perspective, the company has a rocksolid balance sheet and has a high conversion of net income to free cash flow, which it uses for share repurchases, dividend growth and tuck-in acquisitions.”
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Our calculations show that Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) failed to obtain a mark on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. V was in 62 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 54 funds in the previous quarter. Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) delivered a 10.94% return in the past 3 months.
In February 2022, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on V in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
