Buying unpopular assets

Buying unpopular assets that historically fall in and out of favor has been a very profitable strategy for our team. Good examples are buying goldmining stocks for discretionally managed portfolios at the end of 2017 and during 2018. The basket of these stocks delivered 50% + return in 2019. Another recent example is Snowflake, one of our top ideas in the cloud analytics segment. We bought the stock in 1Q 2021 while there was a rotation from growth to value. At the time, investors were selling growth stocks and from its peak in December 2020 of USD 429 the shares fell 48%. We accumulated a position and the stock became one of the best performers in our portfolio in 2021.