NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) Jumped on Booming Demand for AI Products

Meridian Funds, managed by ArrowMark Partners, released its “Meridian Hedged Equity Fund” first quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. Risk assets continued to rise while market volatility remained low in the first quarter, perhaps indicating that investors are becoming somewhat complacent.  In the quarter, the fund appreciated 5.46% (net), trailing its benchmark, the S&P 500 Index, which returned 10.56%. Also, the Fund slightly lagged behind its secondary benchmark, the CBOE S&P 500 Buy/Write Index’s 6.02% return. In addition, you can check the top 5 holdings of the fund to know its best picks in 2024.

Meridian Hedged Equity Fund highlighted stocks like NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), in the first quarter 2024 investor letter. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) offers graphics and compute and networking solutions. The one-month return of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was 14.39%, and its shares gained 209.64% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On June 26, 2024, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock closed at $126.40 per share with a market capitalization of $3.109 trillion.

Meridian Hedged Equity Fund stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:

“NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a leading designer of graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system-on-a-chip units for the mobile computing and automotive markets. The company has experienced strong performance recently due to booming demand for its data center products, particularly those related to artificial intelligence. A major driver of Nvidia’s recent success has been the growing adoption of its GPU accelerators for AI training and inference across various end markets. The company’s GPUs have become an industry standard for training large language models (LLMs), and its networking solutions, such as NVLink and InfiniBand, are critical to maximizing the performance of AI systems. Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPU platform is expected to further extend its lead in the AI accelerator market, with significant performance and total cost of ownership benefits over its predecessors. As the AI market continues to expand with growing adoption across enterprises and sovereign nations, we expect Nvidia to maintain its dominance and experience sustained growth in its data center business. Beyond data centers, Nvidia has also benefited from strong demand in its gaming business, which has recovered after a period of inventory digestion in 2022. The company’s gaming GPUs have been well-received, and its focus on the high-end market has supported growth in average selling prices. Looking ahead, we expect the gaming market to remain healthy with ongoing growth potential. Nvidia also sees opportunities to diversify its business and foray into new markets, such as automotive and robotics. We continued to hold our position in Nvidia.”

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is in 5th position on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 186 hedge fund portfolios held NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) at the end of the first quarter which was 173 in the previous quarter. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported another record quarter in Q1 with $26 billion in revenues, representing a 262% year-over-year increase. 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.

We discussed NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in another article and shared the list of best of breed stocks to buy for the third quarter of 2024 according to Bank of America. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 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.