Investment management company Vulcan Value Partners recently released its fourth-quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In 2024, the US economy was stronger than expected; the large-cap stocks led the robust U.S. equities markets. Although it is still excessively high, inflation did decrease throughout the course of the year. The largest market cap U.S. Companies performed better than the whole market. Lastly, U.S. stocks outperformed the majority of equities in non-U.S. markets. During Q4 and 2024, Focus and Focus Plus were the best performing strategies while Small Cap was the worst performing. However, all strategies had positive returns for the year. In the quarter, the Large Cap Composite returned -0.1% net of fees and expenses, the Small Cap Composite returned -7.3% net, the Focus Composite returned 6.3% net, the Focus Plus composite returned 7.4% and the All-Cap Composite returned -2.5% net. For more information on the fund’s best picks in 2024, please check its top five holdings.
Vulcan Value Partners highlighted stocks like KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) in the fourth quarter 2024 investor letter. KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) is an equity and real estate investment firm. The one-month return of KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) was 6.77%, and its shares gained 87.89% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On January 16, 2025, KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) stock closed at $153.24 per share with a market capitalization of $136.11 billion.
Vulcan Value Partners stated the following regarding KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“During the quarter, we sold KKR & Co. and InterContinental Hotels Group. We owned KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) for over six years. During that time, the company converted from a publicly traded partnership to a C corp, and both its value and stock price compounded at strong mid double-digit rates. KKR’s stock price reached our estimate of fair value and following our discipline, we sold it because we no longer had a margin of safety and reallocated capital into more discounted companies with attractive margins of safety.”
A modern looking financial adviser sitting in front of a trading monitor, gesturing to a group of investors.
KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 66 hedge fund portfolios held KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) at the end of the third quarter which was 75 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) 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 KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) and shared Alphyn Capital Management’s views on the company. Moon Capital Management sold its stake in KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) during Q4 2024. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
READ NEXT: Michael Burry Is Selling These Stocks and A New Dawn Is Coming to US Stocks.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.