Should You Consider Bank OZK (OZK) As One of Your Investment Picks?

Wasatch Global Investors, an investment management firm, published its “Wasatch Core Growth Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 5.59% was recorded by the fund for the Q1 of 2021, trailing the benchmark, Russell 2000 Index, that increased 12.70% and the Russell 2000 Growth Index that rose 4.88% for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Wasatch Global Investors, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Bank OZK (NASDAQ: OZK), and shared their insights on the company. Bank OZK is a Little Rock, Arkansas-based bank company that currently has a $5.6 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, OZK delivered a 38.76% return, extending its 12-month gains to 97.86%. As of May 07, 2021, the stock closed at $43.39 per share.

Here is what Wasatch Global Investors has to say about Bank OZK in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“Another strong contributor was Bank OZK (OZK), a full-service bank offering financial services such as savings accounts, personal and business loans, debit and credit cards, letters of credit, certificates of deposit, mortgages, equipment financing, cash management and online banking. Bank OZK specializes in commercial real estate. While loan growth hasn’t accelerated yet, loss provisions should decline and credit conditions should get stronger as the economy continues to reopen. The stock bounced higher in anticipation of these improvements.”

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Our calculations show that Bank OZK (NASDAQ: OZK) 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, Bank OZK was in 20 hedge fund portfolios. OZK delivered a 14.27% 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.

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Federal Reserve has been creating trillions of dollars electronically to keep the interest rates near zero. We believe this will lead to inflation and boost real estate prices. So, we recommended this real estate stock to our monthly premium newsletter subscribers. We go through lists like the 15 best innovative stocks to buy to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our website:

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.