Time to Take Profits in Molson Coors Beverage Co. (TAP)?

Argosy Investors, an investment management firm, published its second quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A portfolio return of 16.5% was recorded by the fund for the second half of 2021, while the S&P 500 by comparison returned 15.3%. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.

In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Argosy Investors, the fund mentioned Molson Coors Beverage Company (NYSE: TAP), and discussed its stance on the firm. Molson Coors Beverage Company is a Chicago, Illinois-based drink and brewing company, that currently has a $10.7 billion market capitalization. TAP delivered an 8.61% return since the beginning of the year, extending its 12-month returns to 33.55%. The stock closed at $49.25 per share on August 02, 2021.

Here is what Argosy Investors has to say about Molson Coors Beverage Company in its Q2 2021 investor letter:

TAP (+52% from August 2020 purchase to sale) was never intended to be a core position. I expected a couple of years of deleveraging and perhaps some excitement around the hard seltzer category, but the stock price increased faster than I expected. I have not fully exited these positions as I rarely do all in one trade, but hopefully this gives some perspective into my thinking on selling so quickly.”

Coors, Beer, Drinks

Photo by Jay Miller on Unsplash

Based on our calculations, Molson Coors Beverage Company (NYSE: TAP) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. TAP was in 34 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021, compared to 39 funds in the fourth quarter of 2020. Molson Coors Beverage Company (NYSE: TAP) delivered a -13.10% 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.