Ken Fisher’s Top 5 Stock Picks

2. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Ken Fisher’s Stake: $8.32 billion

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) remains the most popular stock among the over 900 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey. Based on latest filings, 300 hedge funds out of the 910 funds in Insider Monkey’s database had stakes in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) beats the second most popular stock among hedge funds (Amazon) by a wide margin of 22 hedge funds. Ken Fisher’s hedge fund had an $8.32 billion stake in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) as of the end of June.

Baron Opportunity Fund made the following comment about Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its second quarter 2023 investor letter:

“Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a software company traditionally known for its Windows and Office products. Over the last five years, it has built a $60-plus billion cloud business, including its infrastructure-as-a-service Azure business, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 (Microsoft’s customer relationship management offering). Shares increased on financial results that exceeded consensus with Azure beating guidance for the second time in four quarters, coming in one point ahead of forecasts at 31% constant-currency growth. Forward quarterly guidance for Azure landed a full two points ahead of expectations (26% to 27% constant-currency growth), with the company highlighting “stable trends” from January persisting through April. In the Q&A section of the call, the CEO noted that the company was seeing a good balance of new workloads and ongoing optimizations, with the CFO following up that “at some point, workloads just can’t be optimized much further, and when you start to anniversary that, you do see that it gets a little bit easier in terms of comps year-over-year. And so, you even see that a little bit in our guidance, some of that impact.” Microsoft is executing at a high level, navigating a challenging macro backdrop while aggressively investing in long-term growth. The company’s proven ability to innovate is only getting stronger with continued enhancements across the portfolio including business analytics, cybersecurity, and, more recently, AI, with the launch of Azure OpenAI services and Copilots across its application portfolio.”