Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Asset Fund” fourth quarter 2022 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. The fund increased by 12.21% in the fourth quarter, outperforming the Russell Midcap Growth Index which returned 6.90%. Stock selection and underexposure to stocks with high measures of Residual Volatility and Beta led the fund to outperform in the quarter. For 2022, the fund fell 25.87% compared to a -26.72% return for the Russell Midcap Growth Index. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2022.
Baron Asset Fund highlighted stocks like ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in its Q4 2022 investor letter. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is a clinical research company. On February 13, 2023, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) stock closed at $237.95 per share. One-month return of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) was 6.00%, and its shares lost 6.99% of their value over the last 52 weeks. ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) has a market capitalization of $19.427 billion.
Baron Asset Fund made the following comment about ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in its Q4 2022 investor letter:
“We did add modestly to our stake in ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR), the second largest participant in the $50 billion contract management organization (CMO) market. The company provides outsourced drug and device development and commercialization services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies. We believe that ICON is poised to benefit from a variety of positive secular growth trends, and we believe that ICON should remain relatively unimpacted by potential disruption in the broader economy. As clinical drug trials become increasingly complex and global in scope, market share among CMOs has been shifting to large-scale providers like ICON. The company offers several advantages to drug developers, particularly smaller and mid-sized biotechnology firms that lack the internal infrastructure to run the trials necessary to obtain regulatory approval for their drugs. These include the economic efficiency associated with converting previously fixed costs to variable costs, and a significant reduction in the time required to bring new drug treatments to market. ICON’s large scale has also enabled the company to secure long-term strategic partnerships with multiple large pharmaceutical customers, which provides added visibility into their revenue pipeline.”
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ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 30 hedge fund portfolios held ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) at the end of the third quarter, which was 26 in the previous quarter.
We discussed ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in another article and shared TimesSquare Capital Management’s views on the company. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2022 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.
