Baron Funds, an asset management firm, published its “Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund” first quarter 2022 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund (the “Fund”) declined 21.0% (Institutional Shares) during the first quarter, which compared to declines of 9.0% for the Russell 1000 Growth Index (“R1KG”) and 4.6% for the S&P 500 Index (“SPX”), the Fund’s benchmarks. Try to spend some time looking at the fund’s top 5 holdings to be informed about their best picks for 2022.
In its Q1 2022 investor letter, Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund mentioned Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) and explained its insights for the company. Founded in 2009, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) is a San Francisco, California-based content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company with a $18.7 billion market capitalization. Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) delivered a -56.38% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by -19.17%. The stock closed at $57.36 per share on May 16, 2022.
Here is what Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund has to say about Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) in its Q1 2022 investor letter:
“Cloudflare, Inc., another new purchase during the quarter, is a web infrastructure and website security provider. Cloudflare disrupts legacy networking vendors by enabling customers to rent their network solutions in the cloud (and pay for usage) instead of buying firewalls, load balancers and secure web gateway devices. Using a global network in over 100 countries, Cloudflare delivers content and security within 50 milliseconds of 95% of the internet-connected population in the world. Shares contributed 12bps to results on impressive fourth quarter earnings as it continues to successfully layer high-value services such as zero trust, network services, and edge programmability on top of its modern global network. The company is attracting a broader set of investors as Cloudflare now matches durable 50%-plus top-line growth (this was the fifth straight quarter of 50%-plus revenue growth, and 56% current bookings growth suggests strong durability into 2022) with positive operating margins and break-even free cash flow. We believe that Cloudflare will benefit from long-duration of growth disrupting a $100 billion addressable market across application services, network services, and zero-trust services.”
Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash
Our calculations show that Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) fell short and didn’t make it on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) was in 55 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 50 funds in the previous quarter. Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) delivered a -45.66% return in the past 3 months.
In January 2022, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) in another article. You can find other investor letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2022 Q1 page.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
