5 Best FMCG Stocks To Buy Now

4. Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ:COST)

Number Of Hedge Fund Holders:69

Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ:COST) is an American multinational corporation that engages in the operation of membership warehouses, leading as one of the biggest retailers in the world across several selected categories.

On December 10, Truist analyst Scot Ciccarelli lowered the price target on Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ:COST) to $538 from $557 after its Q1 earnings miss but maintained a Buy rating on the shares. According to the analyst, Q1 sales remained extremely steady on a stacked basis despite some big-ticket softness, while sales of necessities like food and sundries also remained “very strong”.

As of the close of Q3 2022, 69 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey owned stakes in Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ:COST), up from 64 in the previous quarter. These stakes have an aggregate value of over $4.42 billion. With stakes over $1.2 billion, Fisher Asset Management owned the largest position in the company in Q3.

Cooper Investors shared its outlook on Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ:COST) in its Q3 2022 investor letter. Here’s what the firm said:

“The US economy continues to run hot – the labour market is extremely tight and a number of executives we spoke to described their challenges in retaining staff and preventing competitors from poaching talent. Industrial companies in particular continue to see record backlogs, with the easing of logistics and supply chain constraints only just starting to have an impact on deliveries and lead times.

In terms of inflationary pressures, the vast majority of our holdings have been able to leverage strong market positions and stakeholder relationships to push pricing through in 2022 such that minimal impact to earnings has occurred. Clearly this is not a lever than can be pulled indefinitely but the more experienced management teams have kept some of their powder dry. Our meeting with management at Costco in Seattle was memorable for several reasons but one was their latent ability to increase member pricing which they have not done in over 5 years (and thus likely to do in 2023)…

…To conclude we’ll return to our meeting with Costco mentioned earlier. The business quality is no secret after decades of incredible execution, but the meeting gave us renewed conviction around Value Latencies in terms of the runway for growth, the focus on enhancing customer value, Costco’s vast buying power (it purchases 30% of the world’s jumbo cashews as one example) and management’s feral focus on the business model and cost discipline.”