Polen Capital, an investment management company, released its “Polen Focus Growth Strategy” second-quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. The fund returned 10.51% gross of fees and 10.36% net of fees in the second quarter compared to a 12.81% return for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and an 8.74% return for the S&P 500 Index. Year-to-date, the fund returned 26.29% and 25.88 %, gross and net of fees respectively, compared to 29.02% and 16.89%, respectively, for the benchmarks. Internet and technology-oriented stocks continued their outperformance in the quarter, while last year’s outperformers like energy and utilities detracted. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy highlighted stocks like NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in the second quarter 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) provides computer graphics processors, chipsets, and related multimedia software. On August 7, 2023, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock closed at $454.17 per share. One-month return of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was 7.10%, and its shares gained 165.81% of their value over the last 52 weeks. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) has a market capitalization of $1.122 trillion.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy made the following comment about NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its second quarter 2023 investor letter:
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was the largest relative headwind to the Portfolio as we do not own this “AI darling.” NVIDIA shares rose more than 50% in the second quarter alone, following a 90% increase in the share price in the first quarter of 2023. NVIDIA supplies GPUs (graphics processing units), the preferred (often necessary) semiconductors for machine learning and AI. On their recent earnings call, NVIDIA management announced that they expect a significant increase in demand for the GPUs for datacenter customers beginning this quarter and lasting at least through the end of this year. NVIDIA’s datacenter business, which was almost non-existent from a revenue perspective eight years ago, is now the company’s largest and fastest-growing business.
We find NVIDIA’s competitive advantages to be quite large around its technology, but even more importantly around its full-stack solutions, including highly integrated hardware, software, and networking equipment and a robust developer ecosystem. It would be difficult to disrupt these competitive advantages in our view. That said, with a greater than $1 trillion valuation on the back of what feels like peak-level AI exuberance since OpenAI’s breakthrough with ChatGPT, we believe virtually all the upside opportunities we can currently see for the company are already priced in…” (Click here to read the full text)
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NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is in 17th position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 132 hedge fund portfolios held NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) at the end of first quarter 2023 which was 106 in the previous quarter.
We discussed NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in another article and shared Aristotle Atlantic Growth Fund’s views on the company. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q2 2023 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.
