We recently published a list of the 10 Best Performing Healthcare Stocks So Far in 2025. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Tempus AI, Inc (NASDAQ:TEM) stands against other best performing healthcare stocks so far in 2025.
The Healthcare Sector and its Dynamics in the Stock Market
Despite the ongoing craze surrounding the GLP-1 obesity drugs, the healthcare sector was a lagger last year. On January 3, Jared Holz, Mizuho Securities America’s healthcare sector strategist, appeared on CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street’ to talk about the healthcare sector’s outlook in 2025. While he anticipates another year of underperformance for the sector, he also believes that healthcare has “been so bad, maybe it’s gonna be good” in 2025.
Holz further said that the healthcare sector presents a calamity since there aren’t a lot of easy spaces in the domain. Other industry verticals, such as technology and financials, are well set up. Healthcare, in contrast, appears to have several variables in place, and most of them are not positive. However, he believed that the MedTech sector provides a sort of safety net in such a tumultuous sector. We talked about the medical device sector and the future of the healthcare industry in the US in a recently published article on 10 Best Medical Device Stocks To Buy According to Hedge Funds. Here is an excerpt from the article:
“According to McKinsey, the healthcare industry is expected to continually undergo a shift in growth dynamics. Health services and technology (HST) revenue pools are anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8% between 2023 and 2028, supported by double-digit growth in software platforms and advanced data and analytics. The sales of innovative technologies such as generative AI to payers and providers are further supporting this growth.
In addition, pharmacy services, especially those focused on specialty pharmacy, are expected to see continued growth. The launch of new therapies and increased utilization are expected to be the primary drivers of this growth. McKinsey estimates specialty pharmacy revenue will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8% between 2023 and 2028, growing EBITDA for managed service providers and specialty pharmacies.
Therefore, optimistic trends are materializing for the healthcare industry as a whole, including the medical device sector”.
AI and its Use in Healthcare: Is It All a Hoax?
Talking about the recent trends involving the increasing use of AI in the healthcare sector, Holz said that the scenario is possibly helping the software and technology companies more than healthcare ones. AI and its impact on drug development in clinical trials is another significant subject of discussion in the healthcare sector. However, Holz said that the industry is not really seeing the positive impact of the adoption of AI in the sector. Several clinical trials employing AI have failed in the recent past.
So, even though it seems that the science and technology behind the scenes is getting better, it hasn’t necessarily translated to better drug development and higher approval rates. Although he expects that the use of AI may lead to better results in the future, Holz believes that it is too early to make generalizations that the AI craze will lead to better results for biotech or pharma, at least in the near term.
Our Methodology
We used Finviz to screen healthcare stocks and looked at their year-to-date (YTD) performance, as of February 17, 2025, to select the best performing stocks. We also included the number of hedge fund holders for each stock as of Q3 2024. We sourced the hedge fund sentiment data from Insider Monkey’s database. The list is sorted in ascending order of year-to-date performance.
Why do we care about what hedge funds do? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A robotic arm picking up a product assembly line, displaying the company’s consumer healthcare and wellness offerings.
Tempus AI, Inc (NASDAQ:TEM)
YTD Performance: 164.93%
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 7
Tempus AI Inc (NASDAQ:TEM) is a healthcare technology company that brings AI and machine learning to healthcare. The company provides next-generation diagnostics across various disease areas by employing technology capabilities. It leverages analytics and data to personalize medicine and has a product line spanning data, genomics, and AI applications. Tempus AI Inc (NASDAQ:TEM) focuses on building platforms for cardiology, oncology, infectious diseases, neuropsychiatry, and radiology.
On February 13, Tempus AI, Inc. (NASDAQ:TEM) announced a partnership with the Institute for Follicular Lymphoma Innovation (IFLI), a non-profit, private foundation focused on accelerating the development of innovative treatment options for patients with follicular lymphoma (FL). The partnership aims to develop targeted therapies for the disease by developing a real-world multimodal, de-identified FL data library in Lens, Tempus’ data analytics platform, through which researchers may derive AI-driven insights to accelerate the development of FL treatments and improve patient outcomes. The development of this follicular lymphoma data library holds the potential to expand understanding of the disease’s biology.
The company also has solid operations and reported a revenue of $693 million for the full year 2024, a 30% growth year-over-year. Last month, Tempus AI, Inc. (NASDAQ:TEM) launched a new xT CDx, an FDA-approved Next-Generation Sequencing in vitro diagnostic device available to all healthcare professionals nationwide. xT CDx offers one of the most comprehensive gene panels available and examines 648 genes to identify solid tumors. It also offers crucial insight to support treatment decisions for colorectal cancer patients.
Baron Discovery Fund stated the following regarding Tempus AI, Inc (NASDAQ:TEM) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“Shares of Tempus AI, Inc (NASDAQ:TEM) contributed to performance. Tempus is a cancer diagnostics company that provides genomic testing results. Tempus has also amassed an over 200 petabyte proprietary multimodal dataset that combines clinical patient data with genomic testing data. In addition to using this data to empower more intelligent diagnostics for its own tests, Tempus also licenses this data to biopharmaceutical companies which use it to design smarter clinical trials and identify potential new drug targets. We think this proprietary dataset is unique with meaningful barriers to entry, and brings meaningful value to biopharmaceutical R&D. As we mentioned in the letter from last quarter, shares have been incredibly volatile. We took advantage of this volatility to buy a meaningful position when shares sold off into the low $20’s per share from an IPO price of $37. When shares spiked into the mid-$70’s (likely due to short sellers covering losses as shares rose), we took profits on a meaningful portion of the investment as we believed valuation had become stretched (shares now trade in the high $40’s to low $50’s level). We like our position sizing now, and would add to the position at lower valuations. We believe that Tempus has significant growth ahead of it and we are excited about its unique business model.”
Overall, TEM ranks 1st on our list of the best performing healthcare stocks so far in 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of TEM, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than TEM but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
