Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund” first quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The fund increased 12.6% (Institutional Shares) in the first quarter compared to an 11.4% gain for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and a 10.6% increase for the S&P 500 Index. Despite higher interest rates, the US economy continues to surpass expectations. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund highlighted stocks like Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its Q1 2024 investor letter. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) provides consumer products and subscriptions operating through North America, International, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) segments. The one-month return of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) was -0.12%, and its shares gained 50.49% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On May 24, 2024, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) stock closed at $180.75 per share with a market capitalization of $1.881 trillion.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:
“Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is the world’s largest retailer and cloud services provider. Shares increased 18.7% on quarterly results that exceeded consensus expectations, with revenue growth of 13% year-over-year and operating margins of 7.8% (up from 1.8% a year ago). We believe that Amazon is well positioned in the short to medium term to continue improving its core North American margins, which have reached 6.1% in the fourth quarter, the seventh straight quarter of margin improvement and an overall improvement of 800bps. Amazon has been rearchitecting its fulfillment network, improving efficiency, reducing cost-to-serve and accelerating delivery speeds thanks to initiatives such as regionalization, with the number of items delivered during the same day or overnight increasing by nearly 70% year-over-year. Reducing the cost to serve also enables Amazon to sell lower priced items and expand its addressable market to everyday purchases. Additionally, Amazon continues to benefit from its fast-growing, margin-accretive advertising business winning market share in digital advertising thanks to its structural advantages of a closed loop system, which enables a deterministic calculation of Return on Ad Spending. We also believe that e-commerce still has long duration growth ahead as it still accounts for less than 15% of retail. Similarly, Amazon’s cloud service, AWS, remains relatively early in its S-curve with cloud representing around 13% of worldwide IT spending13 incremental tailwinds across the three layers of the GenAI stack – infrastructure with NVIDIA’s own AI chips (Trainium and Inferentia) as well as with its offering of NVIDIA chips, platform (Bedrock), and applications (first and third party).”
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) reported strong results in the first quarter and reported $143.3 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is in second position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 302 hedge fund portfolios held Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) at the end of the first quarter which was 293 in the previous quarter.
In another article, we discussed Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and shared the list of best AI stocks to buy for 2024 according to billionaire David Tepper. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as Microsoft but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
