Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund” second quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. The second quarter saw a continuation of the trends seen earlier in the year. The fund was up 16% (Institutional Shares) in the second quarter compared to a 12.8% gain for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and an 8.7% gain for the S&P 500 Index. Year-to-date, the fund is up 38.8% compared to 29.0% and 16.9% gains, respectively, for the indexes. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund highlighted stocks like Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) in the second quarter 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in San Diego, California, Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) is a life science tools and integrated systems manufacturer. On August 17, 2023, Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) stock closed at $169.71 per share. One-month return of Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) was -10.91%, and its shares lost 16.30% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) has a market capitalization of $26.831 billion.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund made the following comment about Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) in its second quarter 2023 investor letter:
“Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) is the market leading provider of DNA sequencing technologies. Shares declined 19.4% during the second quarter, due to the proxy battle led by activist investor Carl Icahn, who criticized the Board’s decision to approve the closing of the Grail acquisition without regulatory approval. Icahn nominated three new Board members. After a shareholder vote, one of Icahn’s nominees was elected to the Board to replace the Chair. Shortly after the vote, Francis deSouza announced his resignation as CEO, and Illumina started a search for a permanent CEO. Despite these near-term challenges, we remain shareholders and believe that Illumina’s continuous innovation will enable it to broaden DNA sequencing adoption to areas like oncology, reproductive health, genetic disease, infectious disease, drug discovery and proteomics as well as across geographies around the world. For example, its latest NovaSeq X tool removes the need for a cold storage supply chain, opening the opportunity for geographies where it is not readily available. We also believe that Illumina’s growth duration remains long as the percentage of humans who have had their DNA sequenced is still below 1/10th of 1%, while the percentage of other species that have been sequenced is still below 1/100th of 1%.”
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Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 43 hedge fund portfolios held Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) at the end of second quarter which was 44 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) in another article and shared Polen Focus Growth Strategy’ 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.
