Should You Now Sell Your Trupanion (TRUP) Stake?

Polen Capital, an investment management company, released its “Polen U.S. SMID Company Growth” second quarter 2022 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. In the second quarter, the fund underperformed its benchmark, the Russell 2500 Growth Index, and returned -28.35% net of fees. Poor performance of consumer discretionary and financial sectors impacted the fund’s performance in the quarter. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2022.

In the second quarter 2022 investor letter, Polen Capital discussed stocks like Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP). Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) is a medical insurance providing company for cats and dogs. On September 29, 2022, Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) stock closed at $60.79 per share. One-month return of Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) was -9.32% and its shares lost 21.73% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) has a market capitalization of $2.477 billion.

Here is what Polen Capital specifically said about Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) in its Q2 2022 investor letter:

“We sold Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) because we are concerned about the deteriorating unit economics of the business. Changes in how vets operated during COVID disrupted Trupanion’s strategic advantage for onboarding new pets at vet offices. This forced Trupanion to compete in undifferentiated DTC (“direct-to-consumer”) sales channels with other pet insurers and increase experimentation for pet acquisition. This marks a significant increase in per pet acquisition costs and a move away from the discipline we had seen from management historically. This is a key variable in the unit economics and FCF (free cash flow) generation that Trupanion would be able to earn from each of its covered pets. While the veterinary community has largely overcome the challenges of COVID, we lack confidence that management can curb pet acquisition spend in the intermediate term while also investing in future growth channels. This can both hamper growth and is a major obstacle to generating FCF. This is a clear and likely persistent Flywheel violation. Management may be making correct and rational decisions to ensure the multidecade success of the business, but the declining unit economics of the business and lack of FCF makes it less compelling in the current environment and over our investment horizon.”

Photo by Karlo Tottoc on Unsplash

Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) is not on the list of  30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 14 hedge fund portfolios held Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) at the end of the second quarter which was 18 in the previous quarter.

We discussed Trupanion, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRUP) in another article and shared Saga Partners’ views on the company. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 2022 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.