Polen Focus Growth Fund Disposed its Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (REGN) Position, Here’s Why

Polen Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Polen Focus Growth” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 1.81% was delivered by the fund for the Q1 of 2021, outperforming its Russell 1000 Growth benchmark that delivered a 0.95% return, but below the S&P 500 Index that had a 6.18% gain for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Polen Focus Growth Fund, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN), and shared their insights on the company. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a Tarrytown, New York-based biotechnology company that currently has a $54.7 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, REGN delivered a 6.66% return, while its 12-month gains are down by -10.65%. As of May 13, 2021, the stock closed at $517.17 per share.

Here is what Polen Focus Growth Fund has to say about Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“We eliminated our position in Regeneron Pharmaceuticals also to help fund the Amazon addition. Regeneron’s revenue and earnings continue to grow roughly in line with our expectations. We believe Regeneron has a differentiated R&D model that has allowed it to bring novel biologic therapies to market in several therapeutic areas. That said, we believe Regeneron has intermediate-term risks that make a continued holding more difficult, particularly considering the recent opportunities we have seen for the Portfolio.

The company’s largest drug, Eylea, may face increasing competition as new competitive therapies have been approved, albeit without Eylea’s advantaged safety profile. In addition, the end of Eylea’s patent life coincides with a period when the U.S. government is seeking avenues to lower the reimbursement for certain drugs like Eylea. We believe Regeneron has many opportunities for continued growth in the coming years, and the competitive advantages from its proprietary drug development process remain intact. However, we feel the investment opportunity in Amazon was a better use of capital.”

Science, biotech

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Our calculations show that Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) 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, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. was in 46 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 44 funds in the third quarter. REGN delivered a 6.10% 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.