10 Best Car Repair Stocks to Buy Now

4. AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 38

AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN) is an automotive company that primarily offers new and used vehicles, parts, automotive repair and maintenance services, and wholesale parts and collision services. It is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN) is well-known for its history of stock buybacks, a strategy that helps the company juice up its EPS quarter by quarter and ensures that it returns maximum value to its loyal shareholders. Between 2021 and 2022, the company bought back about $4 billion of its stock, and it has retained this strategy to date since it announced a share buyback authorization of $1 billion in its first-quarter earnings call.

Another factor that attracts investors to AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN) is its resilience in times of crisis. During the CDK outage, the company managed to manually process about 60,000 repair orders, which immensely benefited its financial growth and performance for the second quarter.

AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN) has also continued on a steady growth trajectory this year. By the second quarter, it had opened four new AN USA stores to meet rising used car demand in the US.

We saw 38 hedge funds long AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN) in the second quarter, with a total stake value of $616.3 million.

Alluvium Asset Management mentioned AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN) in its second-quarter 2024 investor letter:

“AutoNation, Inc. (NYSE:AN) (down 3.7%) operates around 350 dealer franchises across the US, as well as collision centres and used vehicle stores. When compared to Group 1, it sells more units at a slightly higher price and margin, and derives around 50% more revenue. But its strategy is different, with nationwide branding and centralised operations. Although we prefer the Group 1 model, the economics of Autonation look attractive to us. And by introducing this into the portfolio we could thereby invest more than 5% of assets in this sector without necessitating the sale of other attractive large positions. And so after selling a little Group 1 and buying Autonation we ended the quarter with 4.1% and 1.9% positions respectively.”