Polen Capital, an investment management company, released its “Polen Focus Growth Strategy” fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. In the quarter the fund returned 14.43% (net) compared to 14.16% for the Russell 1000 Growth Index and 11.69% for the S&P 500 Index. For the full year, the fund returned 38.99% (net) compared to 42.68% and 26.29% returns for the indexes. The firm had the second-highest return in the Portfolio’s 35-year history in 2023. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy featured stocks such as Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its Q4 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a multinational software company that develops, and licenses software, services, devices, and solutions. On January 19, 2024, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) stock closed at $398.67 per share. One-month return of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was 6.43%, and its shares gained 64.35% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has a market capitalization of $2.963 trillion.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“The largest relative detractors in the quarter were Illumina, Airbnb, and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). Microsoft’s business continues to grow well, albeit at slower rates than in the previous few years. That said, it was a relative detractor to the Portfolio because our 7% average weighting for both the quarter and the year were significantly lower than the 12% benchmark weighting in the Russell 1000 Growth. Microsoft shares appreciated a benchmark-beating 19% in 4Q and 58% in 2023.
In addition, we also expect generative AI to help not just Microsoft’s Azure cloud service business grow, but also to be an additional growth driver for the company’s Productivity Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and Power Platform, which helps build internal apps for businesses.
Microsoft has created generative AI co-pilots, which are bots that use large language models (LLMs) to make a customer’s Microsoft software even more functional. As an example, co-pilot offerings from Microsoft can take text and data from Word and Excel and automatically create a PowerPoint presentation from it. We expect to see generative AI demand from Azure customers becoming a larger contributor to growth of that segment while Microsoft Co-pilot becomes a premium feature of the high-end Microsoft commercial bundles, leading to better pricing. Given the strength of the company’s existing businesses and the expected strong product cycle driven by generative AI advancements, we chose to add to our Microsoft position. It is now our second largest position behind Amazon.”
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Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is in first position on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 306 hedge fund portfolios held Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) at the end of third quarter which was 300 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in another article and shared the list of top-rated blue-chip stocks Wall Street analysts are in love with in January 2024. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 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.
