This article presents an overview of the Hedge Fund Manager Charles Paquelet’s Top 5 Tech Stock Picks. For a detailed overview of such stocks, read our article, Hedge Fund Manager Charles Paquelet’s Top 10 Tech Stock Picks.
5. Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META)
Skylands Capital’s Stake Value: $5,466,824
Charles Paquelet’s hedge fund owns a $5.5 million stake in social media giant Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META). The stock has gained about 172% over the past one year.
As of the end of the third quarter of 2023, 234 hedge funds out of the 910 funds tracked by Insider Monkey had stakes in Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META). The biggest stakeholder of Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) during this period was Catherine D. Wood’s ARK Investment Management which owns an $110 million stake in Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META).
Rowan Street Capital stated the following regarding Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its 2023 annual investor letter:
“Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) has become our largest position in the fund, up +268% in just 14 months, aging very well from our November 2022 note. We gave a re-cap of this extraordinary move in our last letter in November and we encourage you to review. Our investment in Meta makes a great case to study. We first invested in the stock in 2018 and we just recently doubled our money on this investment in 2023. It took exactly 5 years and provided a very decent return of 15% per annum, however it hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride. Please take a look at the chart below:
As you can see, we first started buying the stock in April of 2018 at $150 and then added in December of 2018 when the price dropped to $135, adding further to our position when the stock eventually rose to mid-200s. In the first two years there was zero return from our investment. Covid took the stock to new highs of $372, and subsequently, in 2022, the stock dropped to new lows of $89 — a price not seen since 2015. When we wrote our note on Meta last year, we were sitting on a negative return for a 4 year time period. This can be pretty demoralizing and discouraging to investors. However, it is very crucial to be able to adopt the mentality of a business owner and to focus solely on the fundamentals of the business itself rather than the narrative around the stock. It’s interesting (and it happens very often in the world of investing) that you can have 3-4 years of zero to negative returns and then the stock can quickly skyrocket in just 6-12 months, paying handsomely for the wait. Staying invested when the stock experiences this kind of volatility can be emotionally difficult and there could be a lot of pressure to sell throughout the journey. However, if our investment thesis has not changed, management is executing well and the business continues to grow and make more money over time, we can afford to wait.”