2. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Motley Fool’s Stake Value: $75,586,000
Percentage of Motley Fool’s 13F Portfolio: 4.83%
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 158
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a California-based multinational tech firm that operates as the parent company for Google and its subsidiaries. Motley Fool, as of Q4 2021, owned 26,122 shares of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), worth $75.5 million, representing 4.83% of the total 13F holdings.
On April 26, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) reported its Q1 2022 financial results, posting earnings per share of $24.62, falling short of analysts’ predictions by $0.92. The first quarter revenue grew close to 23% year-over-year to $68.01 billion, ahead of market consensus by 142.21 million. The company also authorized a share repurchase program of $70 billion of its Class A and Class C shares.
Credit Suisse analyst Stephen Ju on April 21 reiterated an Outperform rating on Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) but lowered the firm’s price target on the stock to $3,450 from $3,500. The analyst continues to collect advertiser feedback suggesting increased spend allocation across Google properties amid lingering IDFA headwinds, and his FXN growth estimates remain unchanged.
Among the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey, 158 funds were bullish on Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, collectively holding stakes worth $36.6 billion. Chris Hohn’s TCI Fund Management is the leading position holder in the company, with 2.95 million shares valued at $8.5 billion.
Here is what Ensemble Capital has to say about Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its Q1 2022 investor letter:
“Google (6.6% weight in the Fund): Google is one of the most extraordinary businesses of the digital age. Its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This is such a broad organizing principle for a company whose value is built on doing just that. When you think about the mass adoption of the Internet, smartphones, social and digital media, and e-commerce among billions of users every day, and the exponential growth of data that has brought, we all know how valuable Google’s role in collecting, organizing, and filtering all that information has become in our daily lives.
NVidia’s CEO Jensen Huang put the challenge really well in an interview with Tech Analyst Ben Thompson recently:
“We know that there are a trillion things on the Internet and the number of things on the Internet is large and expanding incredibly fast, and yet we have this little, tiny personal computer called a phone… How do we possibly figure out of the trillion things on the internet that we want to see on our little tiny phone?
Well, there needs to be a filter in between… basically an AI, a recommender system. A recommender that figures out based on the nature of the content, the characteristics of the content, the features of the content, based on your implicit and your explicit [preferences], find a way through all of that to predict what you would like to see.
I mean, that’s a miracle! That’s really quite a miracle to be able to do that at scale for everything from movies and books and music and news and videos and you name it.”
While Huang was talking about the role of artificial intelligence more generally amidst the data explosion, it’s hard not to think of Google as most fitting the role of the Internet’s leading “recommender system,” with its de facto role as the gateway to the Internet. In fact, it’s no coincidence that Google is a leader in AI technology, which it applies across most of its services…” (Click here to see the full text)
