Investment management company Vulcan Value Partners recently released its fourth-quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In 2024, the US economy was stronger than expected; the large-cap stocks led the robust U.S. equities markets. Although it is still excessively high, inflation did decrease throughout the course of the year. The largest market cap U.S. Companies performed better than the whole market. Lastly, U.S. stocks outperformed the majority of equities in non-U.S. markets. During Q4 and 2024, Focus and Focus Plus were the best performing strategies while Small Cap was the worst performing. However, all strategies had positive returns for the year. In the quarter, the Large Cap Composite returned -0.1% net of fees and expenses, the Small Cap Composite returned -7.3% net, the Focus Composite returned 6.3% net, the Focus Plus composite returned 7.4% and the All-Cap Composite returned -2.5% net. For more information on the fund’s best picks in 2024, please check its top five holdings.
Vulcan Value Partners highlighted stocks like Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM), in the third quarter 2024 investor letter. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) offers Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together. The one-month return of Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was -5.56%, and its shares gained 15.55% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On January 17, 2025, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stock closed at $324.56 per share with a market capitalization of $310.604 billion.
Vulcan Value Partners stated the following regarding Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“There were five material contributors to performance: Amazon.com Inc., Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM), Live Nation Entertainment Inc., Carlyle Group Inc., and Alphabet Inc. There were no material detractors. Salesforce is the world’s leading SaaS vendor for customer relationship management (CRM) and salesforce automation (SFA) software. Salesforce offers many other products including software for marketing automation, customer service automation, analytics, application integration, and enterprise collaboration among others. Salesforce is deeply entrenched within its customer base, has high retention, high recurring revenue, and is a scalable business with high free cash flow and margin potential. Salesforce reported solid earnings and provided several positive data points around its AI strategy.”
A customer service team in an office setting using the company’s Customer 360 platform to communicate with customers.
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is in 16th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 116 hedge fund portfolios held Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) at the end of the third quarter which was 117 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) 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 Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) and shared the list of best growth stocks to buy for the next 5 years. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
READ NEXT: Michael Burry Is Selling These Stocks and A New Dawn Is Coming to US Stocks.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.