Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Opportunity Fund” second quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. In the second quarter, the fund increased by 16.31% (Institutional Shares) outperforming the broader market including the Russell 3000 Growth Index and the S&P 500 Index, which gained 12.47% and 8.74% respectively. The Fund was up 37.21% year to date and 27.86% for the trailing 12 months, respectively, outperforming both indices. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Baron Opportunity Fund highlighted stocks like Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in the second quarter 2023 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 August 21, 2023, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) stock closed at $321.88 per share. One-month return of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was -8.29%, and its shares gained 16.44% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has a market capitalization of $2.391 trillion.
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.”
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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, 300 hedge fund portfolios held Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) at the end of second quarter which was 289 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in another article and shared the list of biggest augmented reality and VR companies in the world. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 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.
