What makes ICON Public Limited Company (ICLR) an Attractive Investment?

Invesco Distributors, Inc., an investment management firm, released its “Invesco Small Cap Value Fund” fourth quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the fourth quarter, the fund outperformed the benchmark due to stock selection and an overweight in industrials. Despite elevated short-term fears, the firm identified long-term intrinsic value upside across diverse industries. Fund remained overweight in economically sensitive stocks compared to benchmark and peers. In addition, you can check the fund’s top 5 holdings to determine its best picks for 2024.

In its fourth quarter 2024 investor letter, Invesco Small Cap Value Fund emphasized stocks such as ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR). Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is a clinical research organization. The one-month return of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) was -5.76%, and its shares lost 47.29% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On March 11, 2025, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) stock closed at $175.78 per share with a market capitalization of $14.195 billion.

Invesco Small Cap Value Fund stated the following regarding ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:

“ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR): The company is the largest pure-play (a company that focuses on a particular product or service in order to obtain a large market share in that space) contract research organization (CRO) and a leading global player in the industry’s oligopoly. The company leverages therapeutic expertise and economies of scale to provide value to pharmaceutical and biotech clients. Increases in the complexity, duration and cost of drug development have increased the importance of scale for contract research companies and have also accelerated outsourcing in recent years. We believe ICON is well positioned to benefit from these trends. Recent lackluster financial results gave us the opportunity to buy the stock at what we saw as a significant discount to our estimate of intrinsic value.”

ICON plc (ICLR): Revolutionizing Clinical Trials with AI Innovations

A laboratory setting with a team of scientists working on a clinical trial.

ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 46 hedge fund portfolios held ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) at the end of the fourth quarter which was 48 in the previous quarter. ICON Public Limited Company’s (NASDAQ:ICLR) fourth quarter revenue was $2.04 billion, represents a year-on-year decrease of 1.2%. While we acknowledge the potential of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) 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 ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) and shared Baron Small Cap Fund’s views on the company. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 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.