Polen Capital, an investment management company, released its “Polen Focus Growth Strategy” fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. In the quarter the fund returned 14.43% (net) compared to 14.16% for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and 11.69% for the S&P 500 Index. For the full year, the fund returned 38.99% (net) compared to 42.68% and 26.29% returns for the indexes. The firm had the second-highest return in the Portfolio’s 35-year history in 2023. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy featured stocks such as Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its Q4 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) provides consumer products and subscriptions. On January 19, 2024, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) stock closed at $155.34 per share. One-month return of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) was 1.25%, and its shares gained 59.73% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has a market capitalization of $1.605 trillion.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“For the full year, the top relative and absolute contributors were Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Salesforce, and ServiceNow. Amazon shares appreciated 88% in 2023, driven primarily by rapidly expanding operating profit margins and free cash flow growth. After the pandemic, Amazon experienced a period of inefficiency and overinvestment in its distribution and logistics infrastructure. Amazon is now leveraging these investments as growth returned to its e-commerce business in 2023 after a highly unusual 2022. At the same time, Amazon’s rapidly growing and high-margin advertising business is contributing strongly to the entire company’s operating profit growth. The AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud infrastructure and services business continued to slow in 2023 as customers anticipating a more difficult economic environment looked to save money on their cloud spend, but these cloud spending optimizations began to stabilize in the second half of 2023. We now expect customer interest in generative AI will begin to contribute to growth.”
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Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is in second position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 286 hedge fund portfolios held Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) at the end of third quarter which was 278 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in another article and shared the list of top-rated blue-chip stocks Wall Street analysts are in love within January 2024. 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.
