Brown Advisors Global Leaders Strategy: “The Main Driver of Our 2024 Relative Underperformance Was Not Being Invested In NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)”

Brown Advisors, an investment management company, released its “Brown Advisors Global Leaders Strategy” fourth quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the letter the firm discusses its performance, four new investments made in 2024, lessons from one exit, and insights from its annual offsite. The strategy targets double-digit annualized returns over five years, aiming for 10%+ to double investors’ money every seven years. In 2024, the UCITS C-share USD returned 14.7% net of fees, while the MSCI ACWI benchmark returned 17.5%. Since inception, the Global Leaders UCITS C-share USD has delivered an annualized 11.4% net after fees, surpassing firm’s target, compared to the MSCI ACWI’s 8.9%. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.

In its fourth quarter 2024 investor letter, Brown Advisors Global Leaders Strategy emphasized stocks such as NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA). NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) offers graphics and compute and networking solutions. The one-month return of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was 7.08%, and its shares gained 46.56% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On February 28, 2025, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock closed at $124.81 per share with a market capitalization of $3.045 trillion.

Brown Advisors Global Leaders Strategy stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:

“The main driver of our 2024 relative underperformance was not being invested in NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA). Since ChatGPT introduced the power of generative artificial intelligence to the world on 30 November 2022, the Global Leaders Strategy has outperformed its benchmark despite being underweight the USA and specifically underweight the “Magnificent Seven”.7 2024 underperformance of -2.81% versus our benchmark was almost precisely matched by the individual outperformance of NVIDIA, which we did not own. On balance the rest of the portfolio is doing just fine albeit with areas of strength (AI) and weakness (EM financials) discussed below.

We wrote about the concentration within global indexes last year and this continued with only 29% of companies within the ACWI Index at the start of 2024 outperforming this benchmark over the year. Our capital allocation added value in 2024 as five of our top ten largest weights over the year were also in our top ten percentage winners. Conversely, within our ten worst performers, seven were also amongst our smallest ten weights. Capital allocation is critical when index hit rates are below 50%…” (Click here to read the full text)

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NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is in 5th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 223 hedge fund portfolios held NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) at the end of the fourth quarter which was 193 in the previous quarter. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported another record quarter in fiscal Q4 2025 with $39.3 billion in revenues, representing a 78% year-over-year increase and 12% sequential growth. While we acknowledge the potential of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) 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 NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) and shared the list of tech stocks with high upside potential. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 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.