Should You Remain Confident in Your Performance Food Group (PFGC) Stake?

ClearBridge Investments, an investment management firm, published its “Mid Cap Growth Strategy” second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. While the ClearBridge Mid Cap Growth Strategy trailed the benchmark in the second quarter, it had an absolute performance (+14.9%) and relative success (+445 bps over benchmark) year-to-date. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.

In the Q2 2021 investor letter of ClearBridge Investments, the fund mentioned Performance Food Group Company (NYSE: PFGC) and discussed its stance on the firm. Performance Food Group Company is a Richmond, Virginia-based food distributor and supplier with a $6.2 billion market capitalization. PFGC delivered a -1.71% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 31.37%. The stock closed at $48.17 per share on September 29, 2021.

Here is what ClearBridge Investments has to say about Performance Food Group Company in its Q2 2021 investor letter:

“Some of our best performing holdings over the last several quarters took a pause during the strong up market in the second quarter. Stocks that took a breather included Performance Food Group, which declined on negative sentiment toward its planned acquisition of convenience store distributor Core-Mark.”

Based on our calculations, Performance Food Group Company (NYSE: PFGC) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. PFGC was in 41 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 18 funds in the previous quarter. Performance Food Group Company (NYSE: PFGC) delivered a -2.94% return in the past 3 months.

Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ small-cap stock picks managed to beat the market by double digits annually between 1999 and 2016, but the margin of outperformance has been declining in recent years. Nevertheless, we were still able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that underperformed the market by 10 percentage points annually between 2006 and 2017. Interestingly the margin of underperformance of these stocks has been increasing in recent years. Investors who are long the market and short these stocks would have returned more than 27% annually between 2015 and 2017. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 in our quarterly newsletter.

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