Cooper Investors Sees Long-Term Growth in Bentley Systems (BSY)

Cooper Investors, an employee-owned investment company that manages 7 pooled investment trusts, published its Cooper Investors Global Equities Fund (Hedged) third-quarter 2020 Investor Letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A positive return of 9.18% was recorded by the fund for the 3rd Quarter of 2020, ahead of its MSCI All Countries World benchmark that returned 6.94%. You can view the fund’s top 10 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Cooper Investors in their Q3 2020 Investor Letter said that they were able to distinguish a value in  Bentley Systems, Incorporated (NASDAQ: BSY) and initiated a position in the company. Bentley Systems, Incorporated is software development company that currently has a $14 billion market cap. For the past 3 months, BSY delivered a 28.96% return and settled at $51.57 per share at the closing of January 15th.

Here is what Cooper Investors has to say about Bentley Systems, Incorporated in their Investor Letter:

“During the quarter we also participated in the float of Bentley Systems (‘BSY’, US$8bn market cap), the leading vertical market software business serving the infrastructure industry. Its tools are used across the design, construction and operations continuum for assets like roads, bridges and energy or water utilities.

The initial free float of the business remains small with a further capital raise planned for later in the year, so for now this remains a starter position which we will aim to build up over time. The business was founded by the four Bentley Brothers – Barry, Keith, Ray and Greg – in 1984. Today Greg remains CEO with Keith and Ray in key executive roles. All four are board members and the family continues to own two thirds of the company. Across our Watchlist and portfolios we have built a deep reservoir of knowledge and pattern recognition around vertical market software businesses like BSY.

These business models possess attributes which tend to manifest themselves with favourable economics and hence attractive returns for shareholders, including well defined oligopolistic markets, high barriers to entry due to deep domain expertise, and recurring revenues due to the mission critical nature of the software. For BSY this is best expressed by their track record of >30% Return on Funds Employed and mid-to-high single digit organic growth – we expect these trends to continue for the foreseeable future. An added kicker for BSY is the fact that digitization of the construction industry remains very low and so there is a material penetration opportunity.”

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Last December 2020, we published an article telling that Bentley Systems, Incorporated (NASDAQ: BSY) was in 19 hedge funds’ portfolio, its all time high statistics. Bentley Systems, Incorporated proved its worth by delivering a 27.30% return YTD.

Our calculations showed that Bentley Systems, Incorporated (NASDAQ: BSY) 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.