Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Opportunity Fund” fourth quarter 2022 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. In the fourth quarter, the fund declined 4.54% (Institutional Shares) compared to a 2.31% return for the Russell 3000 Growth Index and a 7.56% return for the S&P 500 Index. For the one-year period, the fund fell sharply trailing both indexes. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2022.
Baron Opportunity Fund highlighted stocks like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in the Q4 2022 investor letter. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a multinational software company that develops, and licenses software, services, devices, and solutions. On February 28, 2023, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) stock closed at $249.42 per share. One-month return of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was -1.32%, and its shares lost 16.91% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has a market capitalization of $1.857 trillion.
Baron Opportunity Fund made the following comment about Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its Q4 2022 investor letter:
“Shares of mega-cap software company Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) outperformed despite a mixed fiscal first quarter due to macro challenges that negatively impacted results and guidance, including foreign exchange headwinds, weakening PC demand, and a cyclical slowdown in advertising spending. Total revenue beat Street expectations at 16% constant-currency growth (vs. estimates of 14%), but its Azure cloud computing business missed analyst projections by 1% for the second straight quarter, though it still grew a robust 42% year-over-year, as Microsoft helped its customers optimize existing workloads due to the macro backdrop. While the optimization of workloads is a short-term headwind, we believe it is the right thing to do and should help drive more consumption with customers over time. Our research continues to indicate that the longer-term secular trend of cloud computing remains healthy and intact. For example, in its fourth quarter CIO survey report, Morgan Stanley showed, among other things, that cloud computing was the second highest CIO spending priority (behind only security software), that cloud application workloads were expected to increase from 27% of total workloads today to 46% by the end of 2025, and that Azure was listed as the preferred cloud vendor and likely to take share over the short and long term.9 Additionally, Microsoft is positioned to be a prime beneficiary of ChatGPT. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2020 and is rumored to be considering investing an additional $10 billion for a 49% stake in the company. Moreover, ChatGPT runs on Microsoft’s Azure platform, and Microsoft recently announced the general availability of its Azure OpenAI Service enabling Azure customers to access advanced AI models, including ChatGPT itself soon. We remain bullish on Microsoft’s long-term opportunity in the cloud, and believe AI has the potential to be additive to growth for years to come.”
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Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) holds the first position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 259 hedge fund portfolios held Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) at the end of the fourth quarter which was 269 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in another article and shared the list of most profitable stocks of the last 20 years. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2022 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.
