Billionaire Philippe Laffont is a Founder & Portfolio Manager at Coatue Management, L.L.C. His fund’s top 10 holdings comprise of mostly tech stocks which depicts his love for technology. His thirst for technology was such that after graduating from MIT with a computer science degree he applied for a job at Apple multiple times but was rejected every time. This pushed him towards another calling, which was to manage a hedge fund and its holdings.
Philippe Laffont’s journey towards investing started when he moved to Spain where he started working at McKinsey. It was at this time when he learned about the “boom of the PC” and about the three pioneers of PC industry namely IBM, Dell and Microsoft. He decided to invest in these stocks which churned out more money than he was earning at that time. This led to his endeavors as an investor. In order to learn more about being an investor he got a chance to work at a mutual fund without pay where he learned about different terminologies related to the industry to “get his foot in the door”.
Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management
After his employment ended in Julian Robertson’s organization, he moved on to gather funds to start investing from his friends and family but most of his funds came from professional brokers and people who admired his entrepreneurial spirit. This led to the launch of his company on January 1, 2000, with $50 million at its disposal and the fund’s AUM now stands at $50 billion. His investment philosophy is to provide longevity and good returns for the investors; and to have investors that would bet on him for the long term. Philippe Laffont’s philosophy of helping out people is visible in his efforts to advise people on investing and he believes in helping any new tech “kid” that could become the next Tiktok.
In his interview at the Bloomberg Invest Philippe Laffont said that he is conflicted about whether small or big companies will be the AI winners. According to him the history of technology indicates that the big gets bigger but new companies have also made it through like Facebook or TikTok. He thinks that AI isn’t overhyped and the valuations aren’t out of whack right now. Here is what he said:
“It’s true that the mentions of AI in every TV and and written form is very high. And so one could say, Wow, if everybody talks about it, it must be priced in. And the only reason why more positive is I remember when I invested in Apple in 2009 when the iPhone first came out and for years people told me, Why are you invested in Apple? Everybody talks about Apple. And obviously it had an incredible run. So I actually think that sometimes because someone speaks a lot about something, it might be actually a good sign versus an overhyped sign.”
Philippe Laffont thinks the next phase of AI will be real estate with data centers and especially utilities with power. Another phase of AI, according to Philippe Laffont would be robots with artificial brains called humanoids. The technology hedge fund manager also made the following prediction which has a huge implication for the semiconductor stocks:
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes, You know, betting on these new technologies like AR/VR turns out to be not so big. 3D printing turns out to be not so big. My estimate is $100 trillion was invested in today’s dollar in the PC, CPU based infrastructure. All this is going to get ripped out to put $100 trillion or more in our GPU based infrastructure.”
Our Methodology
Stocks mentioned in this article were picked from the investment portfolio of Coatue Management at the end of the first quarter of 2024. In order to provide readers with a more comprehensive overview of the companies, the analyst ratings for each firm are mentioned alongside other details. A database of around 900 elite hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey in the first quarter of 2024 was used to quantify the popularity of each stock in the hedge fund universe.
10. Nu Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:NU)
Regulatory filings reveal that Coatue Management owned 62 million shares of Nu Holdings at the end of the first quarter of 2024 worth $749 million, representing 2.9% of the portfolio. On May 15, Susquehanna raised the price target on Nu Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:NU) to $14 from $12 and kept a positive rating.
According to NASDAQ, the company has seen constant growth in its net income for each of the last five quarters leading to rise in share price of 40% last year and eventually a market capitalization of around $60 billion that is now 3 times that of last year in January 2023. Furthermore, 63 hedge funds are rooting for this stock to stay bullish aside from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, that is the most dominant shareholder in the company as of March 31st and has a position worth $1.28 billion.
Baron FinTech Fund stated the following regarding Nu Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:NU) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:
“Nu Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:NU) is a digital bank with operations in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Shares appreciated during the quarter after the company reported strong balance sheet growth and improving margins. New product launches and expansion in newer countries are yielding favorable results. Nu also benefited from inclusion in the MSCI Brazil Index, which prompted buying from passively managed funds. We continue to own the stock because Nu is disrupting the financial services industry in Latin America with its digital distribution and intense focus on user experience. The company has grown to serve over 90 million customers in less than 10 years, largely through word-of-mouth referrals. We believe the company’s superior product offering will drive continued share gains in large and growing markets.”
9. Vertiv Holdings Co (NYSE:VRT)
According to the Regulatory filings, Coatue Management owned 9 million shares of Vertiv Holdings Co (NYSE:VRT) at the end of the first quarter of 2024 worth $755 million, representing 3% of the portfolio, which is the largest holding in this stock. It is clear that this is how Laffont is betting on the AI data center theme.
Vertiv expects its organic sales to grow approximately 12% with Americas up mid-teens, APAC high single digits and EMEA low double digits. According to Vertiv, second quarter adjusted operating profit is expected to be between $315 million and $335 million and adjusted operating margin of 16.9%, up 240 basis points at the midpoint with expected benefits from price/cost partially offset by continued growth investments. For the entire year, the company plans to increase its CapEx to $200 million, which is in the company’s CapEX margin range between 2.5% to 3%.
ClearBridge SMID Cap Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Vertiv Holdings Co (NYSE: VRT) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:
“Stock selection in the industrials sector was also a positive contributor to performance, led by Vertiv Holdings Co (NYSE:VRT) and XPO. Vertiv, a global manufacturer of power, precision cooling and infrastructure management systems for mainframe computer, server racks and critical process systems, rallied on continued demand for AI-related companies and beneficiaries and anticipation of greater demand for data center systems.”