Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Small Cap Fund” third-quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The fund returned 9.68% (Institutional Shares) in the quarter outperforming the Russell 2000 Growth Index’s 8.41% return and the broader Russell 3000 Index’s 6.23% return. For the first nine months of 2024, the Fund is up 14.74% compared to 13.22% and 20.63% returns for the indexes. In contrast to the narrow market leadership of previous periods, the market rally during the quarter saw strong performance across a broad range of sectors and market capitalization. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.
Baron Small Cap Fund highlighted stocks like ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in the third quarter 2024 investor letter. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is a clinical research organization. The one-month return of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) was -8.15%, and its shares lost 25.10% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On November 20, 2024, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) stock closed at $203.67 per share with a market capitalization of $16.815 billion.
Baron Small Cap Fund stated the following regarding ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is the second largest global contract research organization, providing outsourced drug development services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients. Shares fell on continued concerns about levels of biotechnology and big pharma R&D funding, with investors focusing on book-to-bill figures, which came in slightly below expectations, and cancellations, which grew 7% sequentially. We retain conviction. Second quarter EPS beat consensus, more than offsetting a slight revenue miss. Longer-term, we are confident demand will improve as biotechnology funding picks up due to lower interest rates and big pharma R&D comes back due to the need for new products, especially for later stage projects that are ICON’s sweet spot.”
A scientist in the lab, researching the development of biopharmaceutical monoclonal antibody drugs.
ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is not on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 48 hedge fund portfolios held ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) at the end of the third quarter which was 54 in the previous quarter. ICON Public Limited Company’s (NASDAQ:ICLR) third quarter revenue was $2.03 billion, represents a year-on-year decrease of 1.2% or 1% on a constant currency basis. While we acknowledge the potential of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) 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 as promising as NVIDIA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
In another article, we discussed ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) and shared the list of high growth large cap stocks to buy. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q3 2024 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.