Wedgewood Partners, an investment management company, released its third-quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the third quarter, Wedgewood Composite’s net return was 5.8% compared to the Standard & Poor’s 5.9%, the Russell 1000 Growth Index’s 3.2%, and the Russell 1000 Value Index’s 9.4% return for the same period. Year to date, the composite returned 22.4% compared to the 22.1%, 24.6%, and 16.7% returns for the indexes, respectively. In addition, you can check the fund’s top 5 holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Wedgewood Partners highlighted stocks like Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI), in the third quarter 2024 investor letter. Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) is a public safety and enterprise security solutions provider. The one-month return of Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) was 4.23%, and its shares gained 69.95% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On October 23, 2024, Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) stock closed at $467.08 per share with a market capitalization of $77.928 billion.
Wedgewood Partners stated the following regarding Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) was another top contributor to performance as the Company continued its steady execution with +9% year-over-year sales growth and +22% adjusted earnings per share growth. While Motorola’s backlog for products declined, much of it was due to accelerated revenue recognition on strong deliveries for its Land Mobile Radio” (LMR) business – a critical long-term solution for emergency services around the globe. The technology behind LMR is quite simple; however, it is an extremely robust implementation that needs to withstand regular and even mega catastrophes (e.g., hurricanes) in order to guarantee uptime for the emergency services that depend on it for communications. The Company has superlative, unmatched competitive positioning in this core business and should be able to continue to expand value-added service offerings to LMR and drive attractive long-term growth.
Wedgewood Partners now has owned Motorola Solutions for over five years (funded by the partial sale of our 20-year holding then of Berkshire Hathaway). We’d like to provide an update on the Company, which has been a significant gainer in the portfolio. As a reminder, Motorola Solutions is the dominant market leader in its core Land Mobile Radio (LMR) business: providing infrastructure, handsets, and related software and services for customized, highly resilient, secure networks for global police and emergency services, a variety of government and military applications, and other commercial and public safety applications where security and reliability are of the utmost importance. The Company continues to find success in using its entrenched position in these mission-critical networks to layer in faster-growing and higher-margin software, service, and video products. Although Motorola has some credible competition in these ancillary products, in contrast to its dominance in the LMR business, the Company is the only player capable of fully integrating an entire service offering, given their structural competitive advantage of its LMR network backbone…” (Click here to read the full text)
A close-up view of a mission-critical communication device in action.
Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) is not on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 42 hedge fund portfolios held Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) at the end of the second quarter which was 43 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as NVIDIA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
In another article, we discussed Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) and shared the list of safe tech stocks to consider for a retirement stock portfolio. Wedgewood Partners expressed its optimism about Motorola Solutions, Inc.’s (NYSE:MSI) ongoing growth prospectus in the Q2 2024 investor letter. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q3 2024 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.