Artisan Partners, an investment management company, released its “Artisan Value Fund” fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. US Treasury yields saw a significant decline towards the end of 2023, which led to a massive surge in the last two months of the year for US stocks. The fund’s Investor Class ARTLX, Advisor Class APDLX, and Institutional Class APHLX returned 9.75%, 9.75%, and 9.79% respectively, in the quarter compared to a 9.50% return for the Russell 1000 Value Index. In addition, you can check the top 5 holdings of the strategy to know its best picks in 2023.
Artisan Value Fund featured stocks like Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its Q4 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is a technology company that develops products to connect people. On March 13, 2024, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stock closed at $495.57 per share. One-month return of Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) was 2.38%, and its shares gained 141.82% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) has a market capitalization of $1.263 trillion.
Artisan Value Fund stated the following regarding Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“Netflix and Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)—both categorized in the communication services sector—rounded out our top five contributors in Q4 as well as for 2023. Both stocks suffered sharp declines in 2022, each losing more than 50% of their market capitalizations. In 2022, we purchased Netflix and added to our position in Meta on weakness as both stocks were selling significantly below our estimates of fair value. Meta’s challenges were more self-inflicted as a ramp-up in spending caused free cash flow to plummet. We saw Netflix’s slowing subscriber growth as a normal feature of a maturing streaming market.
With regard to Meta, the company’s “year of efficiency,” as 2023 was declared by Mark Zuckerberg, involved a recalibration of its spending plans to focus on profitability. While the stock also benefited from enthusiasm around artificial intelligence, the re-rating in the price multiple seems entirely rational as shares were selling for less than 10X next year’s estimated earnings at its 2022 lows for a business that still had strong growth drivers, consistent free cash flow generation and a large net cash position. While Meta is included in the Magnificent Seven mega-cap stocks, Meta is trading much cheaper (~25X P/E) than all the others aside from Alphabet (~24X P/E), which is the one other of the Magnificent Seven stocks we hold. While Meta’s stock is no longer extremely cheap, we feel it is still reasonably priced for a good business with attractive growth prospects. We did trim our positions in Meta and Netflix to put capital to work in names having greater discounts.”
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is in third position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. At the end of the fourth quarter, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) was held by 242 hedge fund portfolios, up from 234 in the previous quarter, according to our database.
We discussed Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in another article and shared the list of AI stocks picked by Wall Street for 2024.best department store stocks to buy. 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.
