Artisan Partners, an investment management company, released its “Artisan Mid Cap Fund” third quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the third quarter, the fund’s Investor Class fund ARTMX returned 2.35%, Advisor Class fund APDMX posted a return of 2.38%, and Institutional Class fund APHMX returned 2.40%, compared to a 6.54% return for the Russell Midcap Growth Index. Negative security selection within health care, information technology, and industrials led to the fund’s underperformance in the quarter. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Artisan Mid Cap Fund highlighted stocks like Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO), in the third quarter 2024 investor letter. Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) designs, develops, manufactures, and supports process control tools that perform optical metrology. The one-month return of Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) was 8.79%, and its shares gained 62.44% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On October 15, 2024, Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) stock closed at $204.28 per share with a market capitalization of $10.088 billion.
Artisan Mid Cap Fund stated the following regarding Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“Notable adds in the quarter included Samsara, Illumina and Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO). Onto Innovation provides process control solutions and inspection systems needed for advanced semiconductor packaging inspection and optical metrology. Wafer-level packaging inspection has been a small yet rapidly growing segment within process control tied to increasing chipset sales from AI, edge computing and wearable technology advancements. Optical metrology growth has been driven by a transition to 3D chip architecture, which requires greater numbers of sensitive layers to be measured and tracked. This growth has been further supported by gross margin and operating margin expansion, as increasing complexity drives pricing power. Shares declined in the quarter, and we used it as an opportunity to build our position.”
A technician observing a macro defect inspection process, the precision of the company’s systems.
Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) is not on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 39 hedge fund portfolios held Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) at the end of the second quarter which was 25 in the previous quarter. The second quarter revenue of Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) was $242 million, up 6% from Q1 2024, and up 27% from Q2 2023. While we acknowledge the potential of Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as NVIDIA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
In another article, we discussed Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) and shared Goldman Sachs’ best phase 2 AI stock picks. Artisan Partners initiated a garden position in Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) during Q2 2024. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q3 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.