Third Avenue Management on Seacor (CKH): ‘It was a Painful Loss’

Third Avenue Management, a disciplined, value-oriented asset manager and investment fund, published its ‘Small-Cap Value Fund’ third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 11.41% was recorded by the fund for the 3rd Quarter of 2020, below its Russell 2000 Value benchmark that returned 18.91%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Third Avenue Management in their Small-Cap Value Fund’s Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that they eliminated their positions in  Seacor Holdings Inc. (NYSE: CKH) because of unprecedented actions in the offshore markets. Seacor Holdings Inc is a marine services business company that currently has a $855 million market cap. For the past 3 months, CKH delivered a 34.36% return and settled at $42 per share at the closing of January 15th.

Here is what Third Avenue Management has to say about Seacor Holdings Inc. in their Investor Letter:

“The SEACOR Marine (“SEACOR”) sale was painful, resulting in a material realized loss, but we believe it was necessary as the thesis on SEACOR was no longer intact. SEACOR’s endmarkets (offshore oil services) have been hit hard not only by COVID-19, but also the oil price war between Saudi Arabia and
Russia. Impressively, in other down cycles, SEACOR preserved shareholder capital through creative financing and aggressive asset trading. However, as we assessed the current cycle, the probability of SEACOR surviving this crisis without raising expensive capital seems low. We are seeing unprecedented actions in the offshore markets and we feel SEACOR’s ability to preserve its balance sheet this time will be more difficult.”

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Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Seacor Holdings Inc. (NYSE: CKH) was in 10 hedge funds’ portfolio. Its all time high statistics is 19. CKH delivered a 1.33% return YTD.

Our calculations showed that Seacor Holdings Inc. (NYSE: CKH) does not belong to the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.

The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 216% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 121 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. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.

Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds

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