Hedge Funds Are Crazy About Meta Platforms, Inc. (META)

We recently compiled a list of the 10 Stocks Hedge Funds Are Crazy About Right Now. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stands against the other hedge fund-approved stocks.

Investing, broadly speaking, narrows down to two strategies. These see an investor decide whether to buy a stock for the short term and make quick profits or hold it for years to patiently wait for the returns to accrue. One of the most successful investor of our times, Warren Buffett (see his latest portfolio), is an ardent follower of the latter approach, and his wealth bears testament to his success.

Of course, deciding to pick the right stocks to sit on for years isn't easy or else everyone would be rich by now. However, there are ways in which one can gain an edge over others. One such way is to see what the professionals are doing and then emulate their strategy. At Insider Monkey, we get right at the heart of investing by picking out the top stocks that hedge funds are investing in. Why hedge fund stock picks? Well, these professionals, who almost often charge an arm and a leg for their services, conduct extensive due diligence to pick out the right set of stocks. After all, no one would invest with a hedge fund if the fund was simply picking stocks by flipping a coin.

Yet, while due diligence is great and necessary to protect investors, investing, at the end of the day, is all about returns. By the looks of it, the funds do seem to know what they're doing. Last year, the top ten hedge fund stock picks ended up outperforming the S&P benchmark stock index by 48.9 percentage points. In other words, while the index returned 26.1% in 2023, the top ten stocks returned 75.1% through price gains. This trend is also present in the top 30 hedge fund stocks of 2023 as these posted 53.2% in gains to outperform the S&P by 27 percentage points. Unsurprisingly, year to May 29th, the top 30 hedge fund stocks of 2024 led the S&P's 11% and posted 20.2% in gains.

Unfortunately, though, data shows that as of 2021 end, 14% of the stock market was made of active funds while 16% was accounted for by passive funds. Compared to passive funds accounting for 8% of the market a decade ago with 20% belonging to active funds, it's clear that the broader public believes that shifting to passive is a safer investment approach. After all, while everyone wants to make money, no one wants to lose it either.

But what if one could make their own investing decisions and gain an inside track to investing by figuring out what stocks most hedge funds have invested in? Well, at Insider Monkey we regularly compile data from more than 900 hedge funds to see where the smart money is headed. This is how we know that the top hedge fund stocks outperformed the benchmark index last year, and it's also a strategy that's helped us beat the market over the last 10 years. Compared to the SPY's 235.6% in returns between 2014 and May 2024, the 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 463.7%.

But wait. At this point, you could argue that since hedge fund SEC filings come with a 45 day lag, perhaps they aren't that important. After all, it might be more important to know what the funds are doing now. Well, since we've been compiling top hedge fund stocks since 2012 in our quarterly newsletter, we can guarantee you that the top hedge fund stocks haven't changed by much since 2018. So not only isn't the time lag that significant, but by subscribing to our newsletter, you can gain an early track to see which stocks are falling out of favor among the funds as well.

So, all this talk about the top hedge fund stocks might make you wonder about the stocks themselves. Curious? Check out the 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. We also cover legendary investors through pieces such as Warren Buffett’s 12 Longest Held Stocks.

Our Methodology

To make our list of the top ten hedge fund stocks, we scanned Insider Monkey's database of 900+ hedge fund filings for Q1 2024 and picked out the stocks with the highest number of investors.

A team of developers working in unison to create the company's messaging application.

Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors In Q1 2024: 246

Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is one of the largest social media and communications firms in the world. Its primary social media platform Facebook provides it with a stable revenue base due to a sizeable amount of users that are targetted through advertisements. At the same time, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) has made key moves in the AI industry through its Llama model and impressed developers by making Llama open source. To maintain its dominance, the firm has to regularly ensure that users remain engaged on Facebook and Instagram and do not migrate to other social media networks such as Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter). Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)'s decision to buy hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs for AI training have also placed it in a key position in the AI industry since the GPUs are in short supply and those with access can gain advantages in developing new models. Should the firm succeed in commercializing Llama, then the future could be very bright for Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META).

Baron Funds is of the view that Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) can maintain its key role in the industry due to its sizeable user base and key ties with advertisers. In its Q1 2024 investor letter, the fund outlined:

Shares of Meta Platforms, Inc., the world’s largest social network, rose 37.3% in the quarter due to robust fourth quarter top-line growth of 25% year-over-year with operating margins more than doubling year-over-year to 41%, benefiting from the year of efficiency12 as Meta’s headcount was down 22% year-over-year (note that the profitability of the core business is even stronger as Reality Labs’ losses of over $4.5 billion in the quarter are included in the overall operating income metric). Meta also guided for first- quarter revenue growth of approximately 29% year-over-year, which was better than expected. Advertiser satisfaction and adoption of Meta remains strong, core app engagement is healthy with video daily watch time up 25% year-over-year and the total number of monthly active users up 6% year-on-year to 3.98 billion in the fourth quarter, and Instagram Reels and click-to-message ads monetization continues to improve. Meta also continues to rapidly innovate in GenAI, with its leading research lab releasing widely adopted open-source models (e.g., Llama 2), and internal algorithms and core apps becoming augmented with AI (e.g., Meta’s recommendation engine). We remain shareholders and believe Meta can sustain its leading market share in digital advertising thanks to strong network effects enabled by its massive user and advertiser base. Additionally, we believe the company’s innovative culture, large installed base, and leading GenAI research should enable it to embed AI and GenAI into its offerings with further monetization opportunities ahead. For example, AI agents could help scale business messaging, handling a large volume of customer requests on behalf of business customers, making business messaging at scale more viable.

Overall META ranks 3rd on our list of the best hedge fund-approved stocks to buy. You can visit 10 Stocks Hedge Funds Are Crazy About Right Now to see the other hedge fund-approved stocks that are on hedge funds’ radar. While we acknowledge the potential of META 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 META 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.