Oakmark Funds Purchased Facebook (FB), Here’s Why it Became Bullish in the Company

Oakmark Funds, an investment management firm, published its “Oakmark Equity and Income Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be seen here.  A return of 10.3% was reported by the fund for the Q1 of 2021, outperforming its Lipper Balanced Fund benchmark that delivered a 5.4% return for the same period. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Oakmark Equity and Income Fund, in their Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) and shared their insights on the company. Facebook, Inc. is a Menlo Park, California-based social networking service company that currently has an $887.1 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, FB delivered a 14.05% return, extending its 12-month gains to 78.24%. As of April 12, 2021, the stock closed at $311.54 per share.

Here is what Oakmark Equity and Income Fund has to say about Facebook, Inc. in their Q1 2021 investor letter:

“We purchased shares of Facebook, the company that controls two of the world’s most dominant social networking platforms, Facebook and Instagram. Facebook’s unprecedented global reach and ad-targeting capabilities have made these platforms some of the most sought after and effective advertising platforms ever created. We believe that the long-term outlook for digital advertising remains bright, and we expect Facebook’s advertising market share to increase. Excluding its large net cash balance, the company is trading at a modest discount to the S&P 500, based on next year’s consensus earnings forecast, even though those estimates include little to no contribution from valuable assets like WhatsApp and AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality), which Facebook has yet to monetize meaningfully. We believe this is an attractive valuation for a company that is projected to grow its revenue in the double digits for the foreseeable future and we think that Facebook’s operating margin potential is substantially higher than what the company is likely to report in the coming years.”

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Our calculations show that Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) ranks 3rd in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Facebook, Inc. was in 242 hedge fund portfolios compared to 230 funds in the third quarter. FB delivered a 21.30% 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.