Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund” second quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the second quarter, the U.S. large cap was once again the place to be. The fund increased 5.7% (Institutional Shares) in the second quarter compared to an 8.3% gain for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and a 4.3% increase for the S&P 500 Index. Year to date, the fund returned 19.1% compared to 20.7% and 15.3% gains for the indexes. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund highlighted stocks like CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD), in the second quarter 2024 investor letter. CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) is a global cyber security solutions provider. The one-month return of CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) was 24.87%, and its shares gained 71.98% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On August 30, 2024, CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) stock closed at $277.28 per share with a market capitalization of $67.969 billion.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
“CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) is a cloud-architected SaaS cybersecurity vendor offering endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services. Shares continued their strong performance from the first quarter and were again a top contributor, rising 19.5% in the second quarter on better execution than peers in the broader security space. The company reported strong quarterly results with 33% year-over-year revenue growth, driven by customers consolidating their cybersecurity spend on CrowdStrike with free cash flow margins reaching 35%. With accelerating market share gains in its core endpoint detection and response offering, emerging products including Cloud, Identity, and SIEM reaching material scale, and newer products in data protection and AI ramping quickly, net new annual recurring revenue and total revenue look to sustain a long duration of growth. With its leading competitive positioning in cybersecurity, the growing threat landscape (which is also driven by the advancements in AI, making hackers more dangerous), its unique lightweight, single-agent, architecture, and its platform approach, we retain conviction in CrowdStrike, which is emerging as the security platform to beat in terms of scale, profitability, and free cash flow conversion.”
Security personnel at their consoles, monitoring a global network of threats in real-time.
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) is not on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 69 hedge fund portfolios held CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) at the end of the second quarter which was 76 in the previous quarter. In the second quarter, CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) achieved a Q2 net new ARR of $218 million up 11% year-over-year which was in line with the pre-incident expectations and Q2 revenue of $964 million which exceeded the expectations. While we acknowledge the potential of CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) 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 CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWD) and shared the list of top recommended stocks of Jim Cramer. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 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.
