Seminole Capital is a hedge fund focusing its investments in public equity markets. The fund headquartered in New York is managed by Michael Messner, a graduate of Georgia Tech Institute in Civil Engineering, since it was founded in 1995. With almost $2.23 billion in equity portfolio and a turnover of 89.66% as of the end of March, 50% of the fund’s investments are mostly emphasized in finance and healthcare sectors, among utilities and telecommunications and transport sectors. Further, this article gives more details on Seminole Capital’s top picks according to the data reported in the recent 13F filing: Anthem, Inc. (NYSE:ANTM), Allstate Corp (NYSE:ALL), Delta Air Lines, Inc. (NYSE:DAL), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ), Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE:TSN), and Citigroup, Inc. (NYSE:C).
We believe that imitating most popular picks among them can generate market-beating returns. Even though there is an average delay of 45 days for 13F filings, we still managed to obtain a double-digit annual alpha in our backtests for the period between 1999 and 2012. Moreover, since 2012, our system that involves imitating most popular small-cap ideas of hedge funds generated returns north of 130%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by some 80 percentage points in the last 2.5 years (find more details here).
According to the recent 13F filing, Seminole Capital has cut its stake in Anthem, Inc. (NYSE:ANTM) to 1.07 million shares, valued at $165.47 million. The stake was cut by some 437,400 shares during the first quarter. Anthem, Inc. (NYSE:ANTM) is one of the largest US companies offering healthcare products and services with a market cap of $42.52 billion and has a dividend yield of 1.60%. For the first quarter of 2015, Anthem posted a net income per share of $3.09 and it expects it to grow to around $9.47 for the full year. Other funds with significant positions in Anthem, Inc. (NYSE:ANTM) are Larry Robbins’ Glenview Capital, Donald Yacktman’sYacktman Asset Management and Jean-Marie Eveillard’s First Eagle Investment Management.
Michael Messner slightly reduced his position in Allstate Corporation (NYSE:ALL) to 2.29 million shares valued at $163.17 million, which represents 7.33% of Seminole’s equity portfolio. Allstate Corporation (NYSE:ALL) is one of the Seminole’s picks from the Finance sector and the stock is up by more than 17% over the last 52 weeks, outperforming the Property and Casualty Insurance industry by some 5.0 percentage points. The previous round of 13F filings showed a total of 20 funds among those that we track with long positions in Allstate Corporation (NYSE:ALL) with an aggregate value of over $1.03 billion. Among them, the largest stakes are held by John A. Levine’s Levine Capital Strategies, Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.
