Polen Capital, an investment management company, released its “Polen Focus Growth Strategy” fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. In the quarter the fund returned 14.43% (net) compared to 14.16% for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and 11.69% for the S&P 500 Index. For the full year, the fund returned 38.99% (net) compared to 42.68% and 26.29% returns for the indexes. The firm had the second-highest return in the Portfolio’s 35-year history in 2023. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy featured stocks such as Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in the fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) designs and develops cloud-based software for customer relationship management. On January 18, 2024, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stock closed at $274.46 per share. One-month return of Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was 3.05%, and its shares gained 81.46% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) has a market capitalization of $265.677 billion.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“In the fourth quarter, the top relative and absolute contributors to the Portfolio’s performance were Netflix, ServiceNow, and Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM).
Salesforce has continued to grow its revenues at what we see as a healthy rate despite market concerns about the impact of the weaker macroeconomy on its business and penetration rates in its core CRM offering. Even its most mature and largest offerings, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, are still growing revenue at double-digit rates. In addition, management realized that their cost structure, especially in salespeople, had gotten too bloated. Over the past year and a half, the company has run a much more streamlined expense structure that has led to strong operating margin expansion and earnings growth. Importantly, we do not feel Salesforce has cut into its innovation or sales muscle through these cost cuts but has eliminated unnecessary excess fat from the organization.”
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Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is in 11th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 122 hedge fund portfolios held Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) at the end of third quarter which was 122 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in another article and shared the list of best tech stocks for long-term investment. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 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.
