Here’s Why Wedgewood Partners Trimmed its Apple Inc. (AAPL) Position
Wedgewood Partners, an investment management firm, published its first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of +4.8% was reported by the fund for the Q1 of 2021, outperforming its Russell 1000 Growth benchmark that delivered a 1% return, but below both the S&P 500 and Russell 1000 Value Index that had a 6.2% and 11.3% gains in the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Wedgewood Partners, in their Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and shared their insights on the company. Apple Inc. is a Cupertino, California-based technology company that currently has a $2.25 trillion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, AAPL delivered a 0.98% return, extending its 12-month gains to 88.43%. As of April 13, 2021, the stock closed at $131.24 per share.
Here is what Wedgewood Partners has to say about Apple Inc. in their Q1 2021 investor letter:
"Apple posted +21% revenue growth to a staggering $111.4 billion during its December quarter, plus earnings per share growth of +35%. Apple’s nearly 1.7 billion active devices – billion of which are iPhones – generated $16 billon in services revenue, which was up +24% over last year. The Company has helped Corporate America adapt to a workforce that has been working from home by supplying iPhones in lieu of on-premises phones. We think the exceptional personal and professional productivity enabled by the iOS ecosystem should enable robust pricing power for years to come. As the stock has reflected more of this outlook over the past year, we have trimmed our position to fund other exceptional, though less understood, holdings."
Our calculations show that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) ranks 10th in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Apple Inc. was in 146 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 134 funds in the third quarter. AAPL delivered a 2.10% return in the past 3 months.
The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 231.2% between 2015 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 126 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. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
