Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Opportunity Fund” third quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the third quarter, the fund rose 4.04% (Institutional Shares), outperformed the Russell 3000 Growth Index, which gained 3.42%, and lagged the S&P 500 Index, which advanced 5.89%. In the first nine months ended 2024, the fund posted solid gains, rising 25.31% compared to a 24.00% return for the Russell 3000 Growth Index and beating the S&P 500 Index’s 22.08% gain. Due to a significant rotation away from large-cap Magnificent Seven stocks and toward value/cyclical and small-cap stocks, as well as generally positive economic data that supported the soft-landing narrative and the Federal Reserve's long-awaited dovish pivot, U.S. stocks ended the quarter higher for the fourth consecutive quarter. In addition, you can check the fund’s top 5 holdings to determine its best picks for 2024.

Baron Opportunity Fund highlighted stocks like NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), in the third quarter 2024 investor letter. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) offers graphics and compute and networking solutions. The one-month return of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was 17.70%, and its shares gained 252.80% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On October 24, 2024, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock closed at $140.41 per share with a market capitalization of $3.484 trillion.

Baron Opportunity Fund stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:

"Given the stellar returns of their stocks over the last couple of years, particularly NVIDIA Corporation, and the weights they grew to in the portfolio, we trimmed NVIDIA and Microsoft Corporation during the period. As we articulated above, our views regarding AI and the leadership of these two companies have not changed. On an absolute basis, NVIDIA and Microsoft remain the top two positions in the portfolio – as of this writing NVIDIA is our largest position and Microsoft is second – and both remain material overweights versus the Benchmark."

A close-up of a colorful high-end graphics card being plugged in to a gaming computer.

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is in 5th position on our list of 31 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 179 hedge fund portfolios held NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) at the end of the second quarter which was 186 in the previous quarter. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported another record quarter in Q2 with $30 billion in revenues, representing a 122% year-over-year increase and 15% sequential growth. While we acknowledge the potential of NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: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 as promising as NVIDIA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.