Billionaire Steve Cohen of family office Point72 Asset Management is one of the most successful money managers in history, as his former hedge fund SAC Capital returned an astonishing 29% annually over a period of nearly 21 years beginning in 1992. Needless to say, it’s not hard to find a class of stocks that Cohen has beaten the market with. However, that’s not to say that Cohen’s firms haven’t been more successful investing in some stocks than in others.
While we can’t share Cohen’s best ideas (those are reserved for our subscribers), let’s look at how he fares when betting on smid-cap ($5 billion to $10 billion market cap) stocks. From 1999 through 2012, an equal-weighted portfolio of SAC’s top-five smid-cap stock picks returned an impressive 1.31% per month, beating the S&P 500 by nearly a full percentage point (0.99) each and every month during that period on average. Anyone who had been able to identify that trend could’ve beaten the market by nearly 12 percentage points (and that’s not even considering if one were reinvesting their returns) annually just by mimicking a few of the picks of a top hedge fund.
As it’s implausible or downright impossible for most investors to mimic a large hedge fund’s entire portfolio (Point72 had 792 positions in its 13F portfolio on March 31), being able to identify only a fund’s best performing picks can maximize the amount of time and money an investor spends building their portfolio, as well as maximize its returns.
Now then, let’s check out the newest smid-cap additions to Steve Cohen’s 13F portfolio according to the fund’s latest filing with the SEC, released today.
Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. (NYSE:PK)
Point72 took a large position in Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. during the first quarter, buying just under 4.62 million shares valued at over $118 million at the end of March. The big purchase came a quarter after Park Hotels & Resorts went public in December (it was spun-off from Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc (NYSE:HLT), one of the 10 Largest Hotel Chains In The World in 2017) and may have been due to some weakness in the stock. While the stock’s large decline on January 17 was to be expected as the company paid out a special dividend of $2.79 per share to shareholders, shares hit a new low (at the time) at the end of February, losing nearly 10% in the span of a couple of weeks. The fact that private equity and asset management firm Blackstone had cut its ownership stake in Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. to 16.4% by mid-March from 40.2% likely added some downward pressure to shares leading up to that point.
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