We recently published a list of George Soros Net Worth and Top 10 Holdings in 2024. In this article, we are going to take a look at where AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) stands in the list of George Soros Net Worth and Top 10 Holdings in 2024.

George Soros is one of the biggest investors, businessmen, and philanthropists. Soros currently has a net worth of $7.2 billion, as of October 4, according to Forbes. The legendary billionaire investor managed client money between 1969 and 2011. Soros made a fortune after shorting the British pound in 1992, making $1 billion. He has donated over $32 billion to his philanthropic organization, Open Society, of which almost $15 billion has been distributed. You can also read our piece on the best growth stocks to buy according to George Soros.

Soros is the author of multiple books including the very popular The Alchemy of Finance, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, and The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means. He last wrote a book in 2019 named In Defense of Open Society. The book is a collection of Soros’ writings on various topics including artificial intelligence, machine learning, political philanthropy, and financial markets.

Soros’ View on Artificial Intelligence

According to Soros, AI poses a threat to democracies especially with its extensive surveillance capabilities. He suggests that to distinguish between right and wrong humans must strike a balance between understanding reality and assessing how to change the world in our favor. Artificial intelligence destroys the very essence of reality, creating a disbalance. Soros emphasizes the need for AI to be regulated but for these regulations to work, societies from across the globe must work together. He also added that in an ideal world, standard regulations may have been possible but our countries our run on two distinct ideologies, the open and closed society. Here is what Soros stated:

“AI destroyed this simple schema because it has absolutely nothing to do with reality. AI creates its own reality and when that artificial reality fails to correspond to the real world –which happens quite often — it is discarded as hallucination. This made me almost instinctively opposed to AI and I wholeheartedly agree with the experts who argue that it needs to be regulated. But AI regulations have to be globally enforceable, because the incentive to cheat is too great; those who evade the regulations gain an unfair advantage.”

Adding to this, he suggests that while AI may make closed societies more powerful it may pose a threat to open societies. In addition to that, Soros suggested that repressive regimes like China and Russia are benefitting from the incidence of AI and thus are able to garner greater control over less powerful nations. His primary concern around AI and technology is surveillance and the misuse of data. Soros said the following about the future of AI:

“AI is developing incredibly fast, and it is impossible for ordinary human intelligence to fully understand it. Nobody can predict where it will take us. But we can be sure of one thing: AI helps closed societies and poses a mortal threat to open societies. That’s because AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help closed societies to surveil their subjects.”

A Deep Understanding of Soros’s Investment Philosophy 

Soros founded the Soros Fund Management LLC, a private investment management firm in 1970. He is known for his contrarian investing philosophy and has made fortunes for himself and investors through his strategies. His hedge fund is based on the idea of making elaborate one-way bets on currency movements, commodity prices, stocks, bonds, and any assets driven by macroeconomic conditions.

Soros is known to have let macroeconomic conditions shape his investment decisions. This is a crucial aspect of his trading strategy referred to as reflexivity. This strategy defies standard economic conditions and emphasizes that market participants have the power to influence market fundamentals, and consequently the financial market. In light of his contrarian investment philosophy, Soros said the following in his book, Staying Ahead of the Curve:

“The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong. Even if my assumption is occasionally wrong, I use it as a working hypothesis. It does not follow that one should always go against the prevailing trend. On the contrary, most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected. It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis. … I am ahead of the curve. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it. Most of the time we are punished if we go against the trend. Only at an inflection point are we rewarded.”

Now that we have studied one of Soros’s most important investment philosophies, let’s take a look at the top 10 holdings of George Soros.

Our Methodology

We sifted through Soros Fund Management’s Q2 2024 13F filings and picked the fund’s top 10 picks. The stocks are ranked in ascending order of the fund’s stakes in them. We have also mentioned the hedge fund sentiment around each stock.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN)

Soros Fund Management’s Stake Value: $191.87 Million

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 49

AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) ranks first on our list of the top 10 holdings of George Soros, accounting for 3.43% of his portfolio. Soros increased his position in the stock by 513% from the previous quarter. AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

In the second quarter of 2024, the company logged $25.62 billion in revenue, up by 18%. Of this, product revenue was $24.6 billion, accounting for 96% of total sales. For the fiscal year 2024, AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) expects revenue to grow by mid-teen percent.

In the first half of 2024, the company spent $799 million in capital expenditures and expects total capex for 2024 to increase by 50% due to increasing capacity and capabilities. After garnering tremendous attention for its COVID-19 vaccine, the company is now racing to find a cure for cancer. Its oncology department is currently focusing on six scientific platforms to find a treatment for cancer with the lowest mortality rate.

AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) plans to invest another $80 billion by 2030 to accelerate projects in its pipeline and execute new programs. During the same period, the company expects to launch 20 new medicines that will return potentially $5 billion in sales every year. AZN’s consistent performance and foreseeable trajectory to becoming a novel drug maker explains why 49 hedge funds were bullish on the stock at the end of Q2 2024. Based on ratings from 30 analysts, the stock’s price target represents an upside of 16% from its current level.

Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its second-quarter 2024 investor letter where it talked about AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN):

“Performance in pharmaceuticals and health care distributors was bolstered by solid gains from AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) and McKesson Corporation, respectively. AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical company with a focus on three main therapy areas based on its core competencies: oncology, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and respiratory illnesses. AstraZeneca’s shares increased given incremental positive news flow (LAURA, ADRIATIC, and DESTINY-Breast06 clinical trials) surrounding the oncology franchise. The company also published long-term guidance for the first time, projecting $80 billion in revenue by 2030, or 75% higher than 2023’s $45.8 billion. This projection implies an annual growth rate of 8% over seven years, compared with the 5% to 7% targets set by GSK and Johnson & Johnson and the 5% target set by Novartis.”

Overall, AZN ranks 1st on our list of George Soros Net Worth and Top 10 Holdings in 2024. Overall, AZN ranks first among the top 10 holdings of George Soros. While we acknowledge the potential of healthcare companies, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AZN 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.