Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund” fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. The fund increased 17.6% (Institutional Shares) in the fourth quarter compared to a 14.2% gain for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and an 11.7% increase for the S&P 500 Index. For the full year, the fund appreciated 57.6% compared to 42.7% and 26.3% returns for the indexes, respectively. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund featured stocks such as Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) in the fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. Based in San Francisco, California, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) is a cloud services provider that delivers a range of services. On February 22, 2024, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) stock closed at $99.47 per share. One-month return of Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) was 24.06%, and its shares gained 68.02% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) has a market capitalization of $33.587 billion.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“Most of our portfolio companies have seen stabilization and modest improvements in short-term business fundamentals as the year progressed. More importantly in our view, many have been able to drive significant improvement in long-term Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as share gains, meaningful expansion of their total addressable market, and improvement in unit economics. These KPIs are significantly more important in driving the intrinsic values of our businesses, which we believe have increased noticeably during 2023. In the meantime, disruptive changes that we expect will benefit many of our businesses have also continued to pick up steam. Some examples include: • Another example is the leading cloud networking and cybersecurity solution provider, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET), who described market share gains and customers consolidating from multiple point solutions to Cloudflare’s platform: “And so we’re the one vendor that is able to give people that vendor consolidation, that single pane of glass… that comes through in a lot of customer examples…. people want to buy the entire Cloudflare platform. They want to protect their entire business with that, and that’s driving more interest in both our network security, as well as our Zero Trust products.”
A close-up of a server running a cloud-native platform, symbolizing the power of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business area.
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. At the end of the fourth quarter, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) was held by 44 hedge fund portfolios, up from 37 in the previous quarter, according to our database.
We discussed Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) in another article and shared the list of fastest growing B2B SaaS companies. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2023 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.
