Artisan Partners, an investment management company, released its “Artisan Global Discovery Fund” second quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the second quarter, the fund’s Investor Class APFDX returned -2.99%, Advisor Class APDDX posted a return of -2.98% and Institutional Class APHDX returned -2.91%, compared to a -2.06% return for the MSCI All Country World Small Mid Index. Negative security selection, which concentrated on the consumer staples and industrials sectors, led the portfolio to underperform in the quarter, this was partially offset by outperformance within information technology, consumer discretionary, and communication services. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Artisan Global Discovery Fund highlighted stocks like Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO), in the second quarter 2024 investor letter. Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) designs, develops, manufactures, and supports process control tools that perform optical metrology. The one-month return of Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) was 5.66%, and its shares gained 46.32% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On September 4, 2024, Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) stock closed at $187.88 per share with a market capitalization of $9.278 billion.
Artisan Global Discovery Fund stated the following regarding Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
“During the quarter, we initiated new GardenSM positions in Liberty Formula One, Elastic and Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO). Onto Innovation provides process control solutions and inspection systems needed for advanced semiconductor packaging inspection and optical metrology. Wafer-level packaging inspection is a small yet rapidly growing segment within process control tied to increasing chipset sales from AI, edge computing and wearable technology advancements. Optical metrology growth is driven by a transition to 3D architecture, which requires greater numbers of sensitive layers to be measured and tracked. This growth is further supported by gross margin and operating margin expansion, as increasing complexity should drive pricing power.”
A technician observing a macro defect inspection process, the precision of the company’s systems.
Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) is not on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 39 hedge fund portfolios held Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) at the end of the second quarter which was 25 in the previous quarter. The second quarter revenue of Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) was $242 million, up 6% from Q1 2024, and up 27% from Q2 2023. While we acknowledge the potential of Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) 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 Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) and shared Carillon Eagle Small Cap Growth Fund’s views on the company. 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.
