‘Qurate’s (QRTEA) Improvements was a Signal to Add More’ Says Weitz Partners
Weitz Investment Management, a boutique employee-owned firm, published its ‘Weitz Partners III Opportunity Fund’ third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 7.59% was recorded by the fund for the Q3 of 2020, below both its S&P 500 benchmark that returned 8.93% and the Russell 3000 Index that returned 9.21%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.
Weitz Partners, in their Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that they added their position in Qurate Retail, Inc. (NASDAQ: QRTEA) because of the recent improvements in the company. Qurate Retail, Inc. is an e-commerce services company that currently has a $4.8 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, QRTEA delivered a 61.21% return and settled at $11.72 per share at the closing of January 19th.
Here is what Weitz Partners has to say about Qurate Retail, Inc. in their Investor Letter:
"The strongest quarterly performance came from Qurate Retail, a more modestly sized holding. Qurate’s home shopping offerings across pay-TV, dot-com and other digital channels were well suited for the current environment, driving a return to sales growth in the second quarter (the first in more than a year). Management also took steps to highlight the company’s resilient cash flow generation, paying a $1.50 cash dividend and distributing new 8% cumulative preferred securities to owners as part of a broader capital structure shuffle. We were encouraged by these announcements and bought additional shares of the common equity, which also allowed us to receive additional preferred shares. As trading in the preferred began, technical pressures led the shares to trade at a significant discount to par, giving us another opportunity to further build our position at attractive prices. In the days that followed, the pressure eased, and shares recovered to trade at a modest discount to par value."
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Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Qurate Retail, Inc. (NASDAQ: QRTEA) was in 41 hedge fund portfolios. Its all time high statistics is 43. QRTEA delivered a huge 126.24% return in the past 12 months.
As of September 2020, Weitz Partners had a 1.9 million share position in QRTEA that amounted to $13.7 million. However, our calculations showed that Qurate Retail, Inc. (NASDAQ: QRTEA) 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.
