Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund” first quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The fund increased 12.6% (Institutional Shares) in the first quarter compared to an 11.4% gain for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and a 10.6% increase for the S&P 500 Index. Despite higher interest rates, the US economy continues to surpass expectations. 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 Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META), in the first quarter 2024 investor letter. Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is a technology company that develops products to connect people. The one-month return of Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) was 10.54%, and its shares gained 82.50% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On May 24, 2024, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stock closed at $430.16 per share with a market capitalization of $3.197 trillion.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:
“Shares of Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META), the world’s largest social network, rose 37.3% in the quarter due to robust fourth quarter top-line growth of 25% year-over-year with operating margins more than doubling year-over-year to 41%, benefiting from the year of efficiency12 as Meta’s headcount was down 22% year-over-year (note that the profitability of the core business is even stronger as Reality Labs’ losses of over $4.5 billion in the quarter are included in the overall operating income metric). Meta also guided for first-quarter revenue growth of approximately 29% year-over-year, which was better than expected. Advertiser satisfaction and adoption of Meta remains strong, core app engagement is healthy with video daily watch time up 25% year-over-year and the total number of monthly active users up 6% year-on-year to 3.98 billion in the fourth quarter, and Instagram Reels and click-to-message ads monetization continues to improve. Meta also continues to rapidly innovate in GenAI, with its leading research lab releasing widely adopted open-source models (e.g., Llama 2), and internal algorithms and core apps becoming augmented with AI (e.g., Meta’s recommendation engine). We remain shareholders and believe Meta can sustain its leading market share in digital advertising thanks to strong network effects enabled by its massive user and advertiser base. Additionally, we believe the company’s innovative culture, large installed base, and leading GenAI research should enable it to embed AI and GenAI into its offerings with further monetization opportunities ahead. For example, AI agents could help scale business messaging, handling a large volume of customer requests on behalf of business customers, making business messaging at scale more viable.”
Meta Platforms, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) trailing 12 months revenue is $142.71 billion and its year over year quarterly revenue growth rate is 27.30% and earnings growth rate is 116.70%.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is in third position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 246 hedge fund portfolios held Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) at the end of the first quarter which was 242 in the previous quarter.
In another article, we discussed Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) and shared the list of best AI stocks to buy for 2024 according to billionaire David Tepper. Artisan Value Fund commented about Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as Microsoft but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
