We recently published a list of Renaissance Technologies Portfolio: 10 Best Stocks To Buy. In this article, we are going to take a look at where NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stands against the other best stocks to buy which are part of the Renaissance Technologies portfolio.
Renaissance Technologies is an American hedge fund that specializes in systematic trading and employs statistical and mathematical tools to drive its investment programs. As of March 2024, the fund managed discretionary assets over $89 billion, according to their Form ADV. It was founded in 1982 by Jim Simons, a mathematician who worked as a code breaker for the US National Security Agency during the Cold War.
Simons is considered among the pioneers of quantitative investing. At the time of his death in May 2024, he had an estimated net worth of $31.4 billion, making him the 51st richest person in the world. His use of mathematical models and algorithms to drive long-term investment returns earned him a legacy that rivaled the likes of Warren Buffet and George Soros.
His signature Medallion generated average annual returns of 66% for three decades between 1988 and 2018, earning more than $100 billion in profits during the period. The fund started with charging a 5% fixed fee and also had performance charges of 20%, which were later increased to 44% in 2002. Despite those cuts, Medallion earned annual returns of around 39% on average.
The fund was closed to outside investors in 1993 and has since then only been available to past and current employees, and their families. Renaissance Technologies does have other funds that are open to outsiders, such as Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF) and Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha (RIDA).
Simons stepped down from active management of Renaissance Technologies in 2010 and resigned as its executive chairman in 2021. Peter Brown is the current CEO of the capital market company. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics from Harvard University and also holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Brown’s father, Henry B.R. Brown, invented the Reserve Primary Fund in 1970, which was the first money market fund to be set up.
Brown is committed to the use of mathematical models to discover and unlock the value of stocks in the market. However, Renaissance hedge funds that are open to outside investors have been shrinking for some while. According to a recent report in the Financial Times, RIEF currently manages around $19.6 billion, significantly down from $35.8 billion in 2020. The collapse of RIDA and Renaissance Institutional Diversified Global Equities (RIDGE) has been even worse. The two funds were merged this year. In 2019, RIDA managed about $15 billion, while RIDGE had a portfolio of $14.3 billion. Today, the combined fund manages only $3.6 billion.
As a result, Renaissance’s external assets under management have declined from $65.1 billion in 2019 to $23.2 billion today. Much of the exodus happened following the coronavirus pandemic and was driven by a shock performance by the hedge fund as the stock market rattled. In contrast, the Medallion Fund, which is limited to past and current employees, gained 76% in 2020 despite Covid-19. This is because the fund indulges in high-frequency trading with a lower capacity, a strategy that is strikingly different from those applied for external funds.
However, the performance of external funds is beginning to stabilize after the lows over the last few years. RIEF is up 19.8% this year, while RIDA has also gained 17.4%. Though financial experts believe the improvement is owed more to the fund’s performance, rather than flows.
Methodology
We scanned Renaissance Technologies’ 13F portfolio, as of June 30, 2024 and picked the top 10 stocks according to their stake value. The figures were sourced from Insider Monkey Database.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A close-up of a colorful high-end graphics card being plugged in to a gaming computer.
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)
Stake Value as of Q2 2024: $867,494,208
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a software and fabless company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Its share price has soared by over 2000% in the last five years, fueled by strong demand for graphics processing units (GPU) and AI models. It remains the go-to company for cloud computing firms looking for GPUs and semiconductors as they expand investments in artificial intelligence, and this has been a critical catalyst behind NVIDIA’s financial growth.
The company continues to drive robust results and had another impressive quarter during Q2 FY25, in which revenue increased 122% year-over-year to reach $30 billion, beating forecasts of $28 billion. Net income totaled $16.6 billion with an EPS of $0.68, going past analyst expectations of $0.645. The strong show during the quarter was attributed to a surge in demand for data center chips.
NVIDIA anticipates revenue in Q3 to be around $32.5 billion, with gross margins between 74.4% to 75%. It also expects continued revenue growth from its Blackwell and Hopper Architecture products during the backend of the year. There is consensus among Street analysts on the stock’s Strong Buy rating. They also expect an 18% upside in its share price. Having said that, if the market matures and growth fails to meet expectations, that could lead to a downward turn in the share price.
Most investors, however, remain bullish on the stock. According to Insider Monkey’s database, 179 hedge funds had investments in NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) as of Q2 2024. Ithaka US Growth Strategy stated the following regarding the company in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is the market leader in visual computing through the production of high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs). The company targets four large and growing markets: Gaming, Professional Visualization, Data Center, and Automotive. NVIDIA’s products have the potential to lead and disrupt some of the most exciting areas of computing, including data center acceleration, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and autonomous driving. The reason for the stock’s appreciation in the quarter was twofold: First, the stock benefited from tremendous excitement surrounding the further development of generative AI and the likelihood this would necessitate the purchase of a large number of Nvidia’s products far into the future; Second, Nvidia posted another strong beat and-raise quarter, where the company upped its F2Q25 revenue guidance above Street estimates, showcasing its dominant position in the buildout of today’s accelerated computing infrastructure.
NVIDIA is one of the best stocks to buy from the Renaissance Technologies portfolio. The hedge fund has a stake valued at over $867 million in the company, as of June 30, 2024.
Overall, NVDA ranks 3rd among the Renaissance Technologies Portfolio: 10 Best Stocks To Buy. While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVDA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.