The U.S. equity market has been volatile over the past few weeks, with major indexes reflecting bearish market sentiment. Investors are concerned about the rising risk of stagflation (a combination of slower growth and higher prices), fueled mainly by increasing tariffs, rising costs, and policy uncertainties.
Investing in such an uncertain environment may seem risky. However, savvy investors can still make smart investments by studying where top hedge funds and billionaire investors put their cash with Form 13F. This is a crucial tool for retail investors, giving a snapshot of smart money investments at the end of each financial quarter.
Billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones' hedge fund Tudor Investment is well known for its global macro-focused investment style. In addition to analyzing macro trends and geopolitical events, the hedge fund follows a disciplined risk-management strategy to control losses. Tudor trimmed positions in Nvidia by some 36% in the fourth quarter. Reasons might include profit-taking, valuation concerns, portfolio rebalancing, or tax planning.
Instead, the billionaire investor has started a new position in these two stocks. Here's why they are worth watching in 2025.
Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) fiscal 2024 financial performance was disappointing, with net revenue falling 2.1% year over year to $53.1 billion and a net income loss of $18.8 billion, compared to a net income profit of $1.7 billion in fiscal 2023. Despite these concerns, many analysts expect Intel to emerge as a solid turnaround play in the coming years, and several reasons support this thesis.
Intel is gearing up to launch Panther Lake architecture processors in the second half of 2025. This launch is special since Intel's Panther Lake CPU is the "lead product" utilizing its 18A process node. The company has already started sending samples of Panther Lake CPUs to its customers.
Additionally, Intel has made 18A available to external customers to manufacture their chip designs -- a strategic move to strengthen its foundry business. These external customers include prominent technology titans like Microsoft and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). Furthermore, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Advanced Micro Devices are also rumored to be evaluating 18A process nodes for manufacturing specific chips.
Intel expects the first external customer to opt for 18A technology in the first half of 2025. Suppose all these rumors come true and timelines are met, then Intel may be better positioned to compete with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which is expected to commence volume production of the competing 2-nanometer process node in the second half of 2025.
Intel's foundry business also benefits significantly from the increasing push for domestic chip manufacturing in the U.S. The company has signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce to secure $7.86 billion in grants, contingent upon completing specific milestones.
While foundry is undoubtedly a significant long-term growth catalyst, Intel's dominant position in the PC CPU market remains its major strength. This is evident because Intel CPUs power 7 out of 10 PCs worldwide. Although it was left behind Nvidia and AMD in the AI race, Intel is also working to make its presence felt in the AI space. Hence, instead of focusing just on silicon, the company is developing a scalable system-level solution using its next-generation AI accelerator, Jaguar Shores, to target the AI data center market.
Considering that most of the stock's negative news seems already priced in, there is significant scope for the company to grow higher in the coming months.
Shares of Amazon have plunged by over 21% (as of April 1) from their all-time closing high in February 2025. Several factors have contributed to this pullback, including a marketwide tech sell-off and increasing uncertainty about trade wars and tariffs. Investors are also concerned about the company's extensive AI investments, especially after several companies have launched large language models requiring significantly lower computing resources. This trend is expected to affect demand for AWS adversely.
Despite these challenges, Amazon is still a force to be reckoned with in the cloud computing space. AWS is a significant growth catalyst for Amazon's revenues and profits, ending 2024 with an annualized revenue run rate of $115 billion.
Amazon has been strengthening its technology stack to attract customers for AI workloads on AWS. This includes developing proprietary customized chips alone or in partnership with other semiconductor players, building platforms to train and deploy AI applications, and developing advanced AI-powered applications.
Precedence Research estimates the global cloud infrastructure market will grow from $263 billion in 2024 to $838 billion in 2034. As a leader with a 30% share, AWS is well positioned to benefit from this anticipated growth.
Digital advertising is also emerging as a significant growth driver, thanks to the company's access to unique first-party customer data from its e-commerce platform. At the end of fiscal 2024, the digital advertising business had reached an annualized run rate of $69 billion.
Finally, Amazon is also striving to improve the profitability of its e-commerce business by optimizing logistics and fulfillment networks and leveraging robotics and automation.
From a valuation perspective, Amazon seems reasonably priced, considering it is trading at a forward P/E ratio of 29.2, far lower than its five-year average of 55.4. Hence, Amazon appears to be offering solid growth potential at a reasonable valuation, making it a smart buy now.
Before you buy stock in Intel, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Intel wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $461,558!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $578,035!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 730% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 147% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.
See the 10 stocks »
*Stock Advisor returns as of April 4, 2025
John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Manali Pradhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short May 2025 $30 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones Trimmed His Position in Nvidia and Is Piling Into 2 Turnaround Tech Stocks was originally published by The Motley Fool
