Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund” second quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the second quarter, the U.S. large cap was once again the place to be. The fund increased 5.7% (Institutional Shares) in the second quarter compared to an 8.3% gain for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and a 4.3% increase for the S&P 500 Index. Year to date, the fund returned 19.1% compared to 20.7% and 15.3% gains for the indexes. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund highlighted stocks like Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its Q2 2024 investor letter. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), the parent company of Google, offers various platforms and services operating through Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets segments. The one-month return of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was 2.78%, and its shares gained 20.69% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On August 30, 2024, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock closed at $165.11 per share with a market capitalization of $2.021 trillion.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
“We also added to Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). The company reported solid financial results with first quarter revenue growth of 15% year-over-year, driven by 14% growth in search, 21% growth in YouTube, and 28% growth in cloud (which accelerated from 26% growth in the fourth quarter). The company has also increased its cost discipline efforts, which drove operating margins to 31.6% (compared to 25% in the first quarter of 2023). With regards to GenAI, while we are cognizant of the potential risks to the dominance of search, we believe that on the range of outcomes, Alphabet remains well positioned through its massive user distribution (9 products with over 1 billion users each), long-standing AI research labs (DeepMind and Google Brain), top AI talent, a solid cloud computing division in Google Cloud, and deep pockets for investing in AI. During the quarter, Alphabet also held its annual I/O conference, where it provided an update on its efforts in AI including: Gemini is now used by 1.5 million developers; model quality is expanding rapidly (e.g., context window is now 2 million tokens of length); the new genomics model, Alphafold 3 can predict structures of molecules and potentially accelerate drug discovery; new TPU6 AI chips has shown a 4.7 times improvement in compute performance compared to the prior generation; and Gemini for workspace is showing early data on a 30% increase in user productivity. Alphabet also has real value in assets such as Waymo, which are not factored into valuation today (and are potentially included at a negative valuation as they currently generate losses, hurting EPS). We continue to believe that the current valuation of Alphabet presents an attractive risk/reward for long-term owners of the business and have therefore increased our position.”
A laptop and phone open to Google’s services in an everyday setting.
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is in 7th position on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 165 hedge fund portfolios held Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) at the end of the second quarter which was 165 in the previous quarter. In the first quarter, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) generated $80.5 billion in revenues, up 15% year-over-year (see the details here). While we acknowledge the potential of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) 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 Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and shared the recent stock recommendations by ChatGPT. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was a top contributor to the performance of Mar Vista Investment Partners during Q2 2024. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 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.