Jeffrey Vinik, who just announced the revival of his hedge fund after a stellar career of stock picking, doesn’t see any opportunity in cannabis stocks.
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“I won’t say zero, but my guess is that they’re overhyped,” Vinik said on “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “There’s going to be too much competition, margins are going to come down, [and] nobody’s going to make money.”
Vinik, who rose to investing fame while running Fidelity’s Magellan Fund, launched Vinik Asset Management in the 1990s and focused on fundamental analysis and stock picking. Over a 17-year run spanning the mid-1990s to 2013, Vinik’s fund returned 17 percent annually, according to The Wall Street Journal.
His comments on the marijuana industry came as Wall Street’s few cannabis analysts issued bullish 2019 outlooks for the sector, with Canopy Growth and Tilray as top picks in the space.
Cowen’s Vivien Azer and Piper Jaffray’s Michael Lavery — who earlier this week became the second analyst at a major brokerage to initiate cannabis coverage — expect the market for pot to surge to hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
Despite Vinik’s pessimistic view on the cannabis industry, he has a rosier outlook on the broader market, telling CNBC he could see stocks rising for the next 10 years.
“My belief is that we’re in a secular bull market,” Vinik said. “In retrospect — I didn’t know it at the time — it started in 2009 and if I had to guess, we’re halfway through it, driven by good economic growth and low inflation.”
CNBC.com
