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 Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW), in the second quarter 2024 investor letter. Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) is a cloud-based data platform provider for various organizations. The one-month return of Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) was 1.42%, and its shares lost 27.28% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On August 30, 2024, Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) stock closed at $114.23 per share with a market capitalization of $38.29 billion.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
“Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) is a leading cloud data platform that is predominantly used for data analytics. The stock declined 16.4% as investors evaluated the impact of a recently announced CEO transition, an investment cycle driven by spend on AI, a cybersecurity incident, and a rapidly changing competitive environment. With GenAI capturing a larger portion of the public discourse, Snowflake’s positioning in the future data stack is under scrutiny by both investors and customers. We believe Sridhar Ramaswamy, the newly appointed CEO, can help the business more efficiently transition toward an AI-first world. While Databricks and other key competitors are presenting strong results, we believe Snowflake’s brand, existing customer base, and accelerating product innovation should allow it to continue to capture share in a relatively large and strategic market. Management continues to describe strong demand trends for its core data analytics, which is also demonstrated by the relatively healthy expansion rates among existing customers while new go-to-market initiatives can help grow the customer base further. Longer term, we remain excited about the Snowflake’s strategic opportunity as the data platform for its customers.”
A software engineer at work, surrounded by a wall of computer monitors connected to a ‘Data Cloud’ platform.
Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) is not on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 69 hedge fund portfolios held Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) at the end of the second quarter which was 73 in the previous quarter. Snowflake Inc.’s (NYSE:SNOW) Q2 product revenue reached $829 million, a 30% increase over the previous year. While we acknowledge the potential of Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) 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 Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) and shared the list of stocks Jim Cramer is talking about. 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.
