Atai Capital, an investment management firm, recently released its fourth-quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. The fund returned 12.7% in the fourth quarter bringing full-year returns to 20.0% net of all fees. This is compared to a 26.3% total return for the S&P 500 and a 16.9% total return for the Russell 2000. In addition, you can check the top 5 holdings of the fund to know its best picks in 2023.
Atai Capital featured stocks such as AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) in the fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in West Warwick, Rhode Island, AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) develops and manufactures specialty printers, and data acquisition and analysis systems. On January 16, 2024, AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) stock closed at $16.86 per share. One-month return of AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) was 5.64%, and its shares gained 24.80% of their value over the last 52 weeks. AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) has a market capitalization of $125.317 million.
Atai Capital stated the following regarding AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“In our Q2-2023 letter, I wrote that I expected AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT)’s EBITDA to nearly double sometime over the next 12-24 months as narrowbody aircraft production continued its recovery. Since then, AstroNova has made significant progress towards this goal, and in their most recent quarter, AstroNova went from a run-rate EBITDA of $14.5M ($12.4M at the end of Q2) to $22.5M. However, this significant increase in EBITDA came not on the back of narrowbody aircraft production but instead from AstroNova’s traditional label printer business – product identification.
EBIT margins for their product identification segment jumped ~650bps q/q (11.5% -> 18.1%). This was a pleasant surprise and significantly increased AstroNova’s intrinsic value since we were giving little credit to this segment initially. However, this significant margin increase left us with more than a few questions. Consequently, we scheduled a call with AstroNova’s executive team after the quarter. We pushed them rather relentlessly to try and nail down any one-times that might have contributed to this increase, but despite our prying at the sustainability of these margins, we couldn’t get them to budge. Having said that, we couldn’t get them to give us a clean bridge on the margin expansion either. They mostly pointed towards mix + pricing for the increase and gave some examples, such as sunsetting one older printer model that they were selling for B/E…” (Click here to read the full text)
A technician editing complex data acquisition systems in an analytical workspace.
AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 3 hedge fund portfolios held AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) at the end of third quarter which was 4 in the previous quarter.
We discussed AstroNova, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALOT) in another article and shared Atai Capital’s views on the company. 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.
