Giverny Capital Asset Management, LLC, an investment management company, recently published its fourth-quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The portfolio continued its strong performance in the fourth quarter, but trailed the S&P 500 Index. The portfolio returned 0.78% compared to a 2.41% return for the S&P 500 Total Return Index in the quarter. The fund returned 21.09% in 2024 compared to the 25.02% return for the Index during the same period. For more information on the fund’s top picks in 2024, please check its top five holdings.
In its fourth quarter 2024 investor letter, Giverny Capital Asset Management emphasized stocks such as M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB). M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) is a bank holding company for Manufacturers and Traders Trust Company and Wilmington Trust, National Association. The one-month return M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) was 7.56%, and its shares gained 51.47% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On February 6, 2024, M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) stock closed at $201.95 per share, with a market capitalization of $33.508 billion.
Giverny Capital Asset Management stated the following regarding M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB), purchased in 2021. In general, banking is a difficult business that commands low valuations from Wall Street. I believe M&T is the best regional bank in the country and thus, worth more than a typical bank. It tends to have high market shares in less competitive markets, such as Buffalo and Rochester, NY, Hartford, CT and Baltimore. This allows it to have deep relationships with many of the best customers in these markets, which in turn has led to lower loan losses and better returns for shareholders than other regional banks have generated over time. One might criticize the bank for being too conservative: it is substantially over-capitalized, meaning it has plenty of capacity to make more loans, buy back stock or acquire smaller institutions. There are worse problems than owning a bank with too much capital and M&T has committed to accelerating its capital deployment into either stock buybacks or loan growth in 2025. Doing either one should lead to stronger earnings growth. The bank trades for about 12x earnings estimates for 2025. Market cap: $33 billion.”
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M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 30 hedge fund portfolios held M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) at the end of the third quarter which was 34 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) 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 M&T Bank Corporation (NYSE:MTB) and shared the list of stocks Jim Cramer talked about. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q3 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.