Third Avenue Management Sees Value in Weyerhaeuser (WY)

Third Avenue Management, a disciplined, value-oriented asset manager and investment fund, published its third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 10.94% was recorded by the fund for the 3rd Quarter of 2020, ahead of its FTSE EPRA NAREIT Developed benchmark that returned 10.32%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Third Avenue Management in their Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that they were able to distinguish a value in  Weyerhaeuser Company (NYSE: WY) and initiated a position in the company. Weyerhaeuser Company is a timberland and real estate investment trust company that currently has a $24 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, WY delivered a 10.13% return and settled at $32.52 per share at the closing of January 15th.

Here is what Third Avenue Management has to say about Weyerhaeuser Company in their Investor Letter:

“Third Avenue has long championed enterprises with sound business practices run by aligned control groups that exhibit strong stewardship. Within Third Avenue’s real estate strategy, this oftentimes leads the Fund to “pass” on investments in companies with uncertain environmental liabilities, business models that could be deemed predatory, and corporate governance structures that are stacked against key
stakeholders. Consequently, the select-set of real estate and real estate-related business that make it into the Third Avenue Real Estate Value Fund represent some of the true industry leaders in respect to their ESG practices, including Weyerhaeuser, that own more than 16 million acres of timberlands and sequester more carbon than any other privately-held enterprises globally (to our knowledge)— an underappreciated attribute that may ultimately have incremental value through a carbon-credit initiative or even strategic value for larger enterprises seeking to offset emissions.”

Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Weyerhaeuser Company (NYSE: WY) was in 41 hedge funds’ portfolio, its all time high statistics. Weyerhaeuser Company delivered a 4.97% return in the past 12 months.

As of September 2020, Third Avenue Management had a 1.6 million share position in WY that amounted to $48 million. This made Third Avenue Management a part of the top 6 hedge funds that holds most of WY’s stake, just behind Renaissance Technologies with $55 million worth of WY shares, while First Eagle Investment Management tops the list with $767 million. However, our calculations showed that Weyerhaeuser Company (NYSE: WY) isn’t ranked among 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.