Diamond Hill Capital, an investment management firm, published its “Diamond Hill Small Cap Fund” second-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. The portfolio performed roughly in line with the Russell 2000® Index in the quarter, delivering solid absolute results and remaining ahead of the 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 Diamond Hill Capital, the fund mentioned Sterling Bancorp (NYSE: STL) and discussed its stance on the firm. Sterling Bancorp is a Montebello, New York-based bank holding company with a $4.2 billion market capitalization. STL delivered a 23.75% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 102.09%. The stock closed at $22.25 per share on September 10, 2021.
Here is what Diamond Hill Capital has to say about Sterling Bancorp in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“Though our financials holdings overall trailed the benchmark in Q2, Sterling Bancorp was a top contributor as it announced it had agreed to an all-stock merger of equals with Webster Bank—a testament to Sterling’s strong position in its Long Island market, focusing on building relationships with small and middle market companies that larger banks tend to overlook.”
Based on our calculations, Sterling Bancorp (NYSE: STL) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. STL was in 16 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 20 funds in the previous quarter. Sterling Bancorp (NYSE: STL) delivered a -14.49% 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.
