3. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 204
Share price performance from May 30 to September 7: 23.05%
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) provides a range of products and platforms across regions including the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Canada, and Latin America. The company’s operations are categorized into three segments: Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets. On July 25, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) reported a Q2 GAAP EPS of $1.44 beating Wall Street estimates by $0.10. The revenue of $74.6 billion increased 7% year-over-year, surpassing market estimates by $1.84 billion.
As of May 30, the share price performance of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has seen an increase of 23.05%. This, coupled with a hiked revenue imply that this can be a good stock to invest in, as suggested by AI. According to Insider Monkey’s second quarter database, 204 hedge funds were bullish on Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), same as the last quarter. Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management is the most prominent stakeholder of the firm, with almost 42.7 million shares, worth approximately $5.11 billion.
Pershing Square Holdings made the following comment about Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its first half 2023 investor letter:
“Earlier this year, we initiated a position in Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), the parent company of Google. We believe that Google is one of the world’s greatest businesses with deep barriers to entry and massive network effects underpinning its core search business. After having closely followed the company for many years, we had the opportunity to acquire a stake in Google at a highly attractive valuation as misplaced concerns over its competitive positioning in AI overshadowed the high-quality nature of its business and its strong growth prospects.
Google is the dominant leader in the fast-growing digital advertising market. Google has 85%+ market share in search and, along with YouTube, approximately 50% share of the digital advertising market. With higher and improving returns on investment, we expect digital ads to continue to take market share from traditional ad formats like TV and print, and increasingly drive the total advertising market growth above its historical trend. For example, in retail, rising e-commerce penetration is catalyzing the migration of offline promotion and trade spend dollars into digital ads. With Search and YouTube as two of the highest return and most resilient ad formats, Google is well positioned to benefit from the structural growth in digital ad share across many categories.
Similarly, in its Cloud business, Google is a top three player in an oligopolistic market that is in the early stages of a multi[1]year shift of IT workloads from on-premise to cloud and hybrid cloud solutions. These powerful secular tailwinds have enabled Google to grow overall revenues at a high-teens compound annual growth rate over the last five years which should continue to support near- double-digit top-line growth in the coming years…” (Click here to read the full text)
