Yahoo Finance Is Wells Fargo (WFC) Stock a Buy For 2021?
Argosy Investors recently released its Q4 2020 Investor Letter, a copy of which you can download here. Full-year 2020 performance was 29.8% in select accounts. The S&P 500 by comparison returned 18.4%. You should check out Argosy Investors' top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of 2021.
In the Q4 2020 Investor Letter, Argosy Investors' highlighted a few stocks and Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) is one of them. Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) is a financial services company. In the last three months, Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) stock gained 40.1% and on January 15th it had a closing price of $32.04. Here is what Argosy Investors' said:
"Most of us are familiar with Wells Fargo (WFC); they are one of the top 5 banks in the U.S. with nearly $2 trillion in assets. The last 5 years have not been good to Wells. They are on their 3rd CEO during that time, and the current one stays in New York City despite headquarters being in San Francisco. Wells Fargo opened millions of fake accounts for customers over several years, driven by an incentive system that compensated branches based on their account openings. This goes to show you the perverse power of incentives, if not properly balanced. To atone for their sins, Wells Fargo is operating under an asset cap which prevents the bank from growing and must demonstrate stronger risk management. Not that long ago, Wells Fargo was the most admired large bank on Wall Street, with the highest valuation and glowing reviews about its low cost of funds driving sustainably high returns on equity. Now, it has the lowest valuation on Wall Street and no one talks about the good old days with Wells.
I believe that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Wells Fargo’s business that cannot be fixed, and once they can return to normal operations without the fake account nonsense then I expect they will return to earning returns slightly lower than historical norms. If Wells Fargo uses 100% of its earnings to repurchase share over the next 3 years, Wells can retire 25% of its outstanding stock. By 2023, WFC could earn $6+ per share. At 10x earnings, a very low multiple given the rest of the stock market trades at 22x earnings, Wells Fargo could fetch $60 per share. WFC’s current share price is $33 and our cost basis is around $25 per share. If it takes 5 years for Wells to get out of the penalty box and trade at $60 per share, we can earn a 20% annual return on our investment, including dividends."
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Earlier this week, we published an article revealing that Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) stock dropped after the company's Q4 revenues missed wall street expectations.
In Q3 2020, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) stock increased by about 5% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers believe in WFC's growth potential. Our calculations showed that Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) is ranked #24 among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.
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Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
