Billionaire Lee Ainslie’s Top 5 Stock Picks

3. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Maverick Capital’s Equity Stake: $176.1 million
Year-to-date gain: 70%

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been one of the best-performing stocks in billionaire Ainslie’s portfolio, going by 70% year-to-date gain. 

Here is what Polen Capital said about Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its Q3 2023 investor letter:

“Amazon continues to showcase it’s place as one of the most competitively advantaged companies in the world. The company has made significant progress in managing costs and better leveraging existing capacity, driving a strong recovery in its profitability. We think there’s additional room for improvement.

AWS growth seems to be stabilizing even while management continues to work with clients to optimize their infrastructure spend. Roughly 90% of global IT spending remains on premise. We believe this will eventually flip, with most IT spending ultimately moving to the cloud over time. We think AWS will be a significant beneficiary of this transition.

Further, our investment case on company profitability driven by AWS and advertising continues to unfold, delivering nearly $8 billion in free cash flow over the trailing twelve months and a net margin of 5%. We expect both to move higher with the mix shift of more profitable businesses growing fastest continuing to take effect.

At Amazon’s current price, we believe the company is well positioned to deliver a mid-teens or higher total shareholder return for our clients over the next five plus years without a Herculean effort from the business. It simply needs to continue executing on current businesses and growing into the capacity it built during and immediately after the pandemic.”

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