Here’s Why Baron Funds Invested in Shopify (SHOP)

Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Opportunity Fund” third quarter 2022 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. In the third quarter, the fund declined 2.38% (Institutional Shares) compared to a 3.37% decline for the Russell 3000 Growth Index and a 4.88% decline for the S&P 500 Index.  The fund fell sharply for the year-to-date and trailing 12-month periods; however, the philosophy of the fund is to achieve strong long-term performance. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2022.

Baron Funds discussed stocks like Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) in the Q3 2022 investor letter. Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) is an e-commerce platform. On October 31, 2022, Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) stock closed at $34.23 per share. One-month return of Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) was 8.56% and its shares lost 76.82% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) has a market capitalization of $43.544 billion.

Here is what Baron Funds specifically said about Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) in its Q3 2022 investor letter:

“During the third quarter, we added to the leading commerce platform, Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP), after selling its stock during the prior quarter in order to take advantage of tax-loss harvesting, and after its shares had declined to what we believed were compelling levels for long-term investors. The stock price decline has been driven by near-term uncertainty regarding e-commerce growth in a normalized, post-COVID world, as well as the increased investments in fulfillment (through Shopify Fulfillment Network or SFN) and Amazon’s announcement of Buy with Prime, which enables third-party merchants to take advantage of Amazon’s fulfillment services to offer their consumers, who are also Prime members, two-day shipping. While SFN increases Shopify’s capital intensity, we believe that the company’s hub-and-spoke model will enable it to remain measured in the level of required spending and treat it as positive optionality when valuing the shares. Additionally, while some merchants might be attracted to Buy with Prime, our due diligence suggests that many would prefer to use SFN and maintain full control over customer relationships and data. Amazon and Shopify are both customer-focused, however Amazon’s customers are end consumers, while Shopify’s customers are the merchants. Unlike Amazon, which also competes with its merchants (through first-party sales), Shopify never competes with its merchant customers. Its software and services sit in the background, quietly supporting and helping merchants of all sizes to sell more online (and increasingly offline), aggregating the scale of the many merchants it has (over 2 million) to enable the benefits that only the largest merchants could get in the past. Over time, as it expands its platform horizontally to larger merchants and business-to-business sellers, and vertically, by solving more problems for its merchants, we believe Shopify will be able to address a larger portion of the market, while also increasing retention rates and expanding opportunities for monetization. With still less than 1% of global commerce volume (excluding China) running through its platform, we believe that Shopify has a long runway of growth.”

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Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 60 hedge fund portfolios held Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) at the end of the second quarter which was 72 in the previous quarter.

We discussed Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP) in another article and shared the best long-term growth stocks to invest in. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q3 2022 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.