Is Wayfair Inc. (W) A Smart Long-Term Buy?

Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Mid Cap Fund’ first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of -2.36% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTMX, -2.32% by its Advisor Class: APDMX, and -2.30% by its Institutional Class: APHMX, in the fourth quarter of 2020, all below the Russell Midcap® Growth Index that delivered a -0.57% return and the Russell Midcap® Index that was up by 8.14% for 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 its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Wayfair Inc. (NYSE: W), and shared their insights on the company. Wayfair Inc. is a Boston, Massachusetts-based online store company that currently has a $29.3 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, Wayfair delivered a 25.78% return, extending its 12-month gains to 60.57%. As of May 05, 2021, the stock closed at $270.97 per share.

Here is what Artisan Mid Cap Fund has to say about Wayfair Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“Among our top contributors was Wayfair. Wayfair had a notable year in 2020. The pandemic induced a sharp increase in both home furnishings and e-commerce demand at a point in the company’s history when it was poised to leverage heavy past investments in logistics, merchandising and customer acquisition. As a result, Wayfair not only achieved its first full year of profitability, but it quickly approached its long-term margin targets. While sales growth will likely decelerate as the pandemic fades, we think the e-commerce home furnishings market has significant long-term growth potential and, in our view, Wayfair will be able to maintain (in the near term) and expand (over time) its current margins. Given our optimistic outlook, we increased our position when the stock pulled back early in the quarter.”

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Our calculations show that Wayfair Inc. (NYSE: W) 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, Wayfair Inc. was in 40 hedge fund portfolios. Wayfair delivered a -3.64% 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.