"I read other managers’ letters. I look at the positions they own. The lists of portfolio securities that other managers own are very useful because it means the investment has already passed a very important filter. I think that whenever something in Seth Klarman’s portfolio is trading below the price that he paid for it, it is worthy of looking at, and at the same time, it performs another function. To get better at investing you want to study the moves of the masters.”

“Notable detractors to performance in the first half were US Bank (USB), Charles Schwab (SCHW), and UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (NYSE:UNH), which were down 22.09%, 31.65%, and 8.65%, respectively. Another detractor from relative performance was UnitedHealth Group, which was down 8.65%. However, we have a positive long-term view of the company, headquartered in Minnesota, and especially its potential when it comes to harnessing its vast amounts of patient data via AI. Additionally, its Optum unit, which provides technology and data-driven care delivery, has AI-enabled tools that can help healthcare providers drive more efficient and accurate care to patients.”

“Among our top contributors were Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD), NU Holdings and Netflix. AMD’s data center CPUs are used in the cloud service provider (CSP) servers. In addition to the broader secular tailwind from cloud adoption, the company has a performance and pricing advantage over Intel, which we believe will enable it to continue capturing market share. However, the recent stock price rally was due to growing excitement around the company’s AI exposure. It will launch its new MI300 graphics processing unit (GPU) chip later this year to compete against the dominant market leader NVIDIA. Similar to its approach that won market share from Intel within the CPU market, AMD’s product will aim to provide similar performance at a more attractive price. AMD is already working with Microsoft and Meta, while Amazon publicly stated that it is evaluating AMD’s inferencing chips. Using assumptions around the total GPU market size, potential market share gains and price points, our research indicates this could be a $20 billion opportunity for AMD. That would nearly double its revenue. While the company has not historically missed many deadlines, there is execution risk as it works to manufacture and distribute these complex chips at scale, which, combined with an elevated valuation after the stock’s strong performance run, led us to trim the position.”

"With the bears expecting a softer print this quarter with macro fears swirling heading into CRM earnings, Salesforce came out of the gates swinging featuring a Djokovic-like performance with a top and bottom-line beat and raise quarter driven by MuleSoft momentum and its overall subscription business further proving strength in the Beltway.”

“These are mostly predictive transactions, but we’re moving rapidly into the second zone that we all know is generative AI and these GPT products, which we’ve now released to our customers. We’re very excited about the speed of our engineering organization and technology organization, our product organization and their ability to deliver customer value with generative AI.

We have tremendous AI expertise led by an incredible AI research team. And this idea that we’re kind of now in a generative zone means that’s zone number two. But as you’re going to see at Dreamforce, zone number three is opening up with autonomous and with agent-based systems as well. This will be another level of growth and another level of innovation that we haven’t really seen unfold yet from a lot of companies, and that’s an area that we are excited to do a lot of innovation and growth and to help our customers in all those areas. And then we’re eventually going to move into AGI and that will be the fourth area. And I think as we move through these four zones, CRM will become more important to our customers than ever before. Because you’re going to be able to get more automation, more intelligence, more productivity, more capabilities, more augmentation of your employees, as I mentioned.”

“Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM), a company we’ve owned since 2019, recently added ChatGPT-like capabilities onto its existing Al module, Einstein, to support its internal sales efforts and customer-facing software. For example, Einstein GPT can help generate marketing emails tailored to specific clients by using Salesforce’s customer database and past email correspondence to learn the most effective approach for each client. Einstein GPT is also different from off-the-shelf LLMS in three important ways: It keeps personal identifiable information private and secure, compared with external tools that retain anything a user enters. It employs the latest data in Salesforce’s system, as opposed to the sometimes-stale public data that train generic models. And generative Al capabilities can be integrated with other Salesforce offerings; the company has already introduced Slack GPT and Tableau GPT, Al-equipped versions of its workplace collaboration and analytics tools.”

"This is a clear positive for Apple with [average selling prices] set to be a major tailwind for Cupertino in this iPhone 15 cycle with our expectation of an ASP in the ~$925 range and up roughly $100 over the last 12-15 months given heavy Pro mix model shifts," Ives wrote in an investor note.

“Dramatic valuation differences across market cap sizes continue. This has been the case for some time now. Perhaps I have spent too much time discussing these dichotomies, as generally, I feel like if we pick the right stocks and manage market exposures thoughtfully, our equities- oriented portfolio will prosper across various market cycles. However, when markets become as lopsided as they have lately, I feel additional discussion on the market environment is worthwhile, if only to help highlight the opportunities that are available and the likely path forward. I expect future discussions to soon be focused again on our moderately concentrated portfolio. But for now, let’s take one last in-depth look at how far reaching these valuation dichotomies have again become.(Please note: charts that accompany the following can be found in the Appendix.)

Take Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) for example. It is the largest stock by market cap, and fairly considered one of the best companies in the world. The company has been extraordinarily successful and improved standards of living everywhere in the process with their ubiquitous products. Along the way, shareholders have been richly rewarded, with shares increasing nearly fourteen-fold over the last ten years while generating an annualized total shareholder return of 31%, including dividends.

On the back of another big quarter for large cap tech, it is now the first stock to surpass the $3T market cap threshold. This makes its weighting in the ~$37T market cap of the S&P 500, ~8%. It also means this one stock’s market cap is larger than that of the entire ~$2.98T market cap of the Russell 2000 index, the first time in history a single stock has outweighed the Russell 2000 – aside from two brief days in September 2020 when Apple’s market cap then accomplished the same…” (Click here to read the full text)

“We modestly trimmed Visa Inc., Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA), and Accenture plc to manage the position sizes and raise capital to fund purchases elsewhere. These stocks remain full-sized positions and high-conviction ideas in the Fund.

Another fintech industry trend we’re seeing is a pickup in M&A activity, most notably in the payments sector. The year started with Nuvei’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Paya announced in January. In April, Network International received an initial takeover offer from a group of private equity firms, which was then topped by Brookfield Asset Management whose $2.8 billion offer was accepted by the Board in June. Following reports earlier this year of a bidding war between Visa Inc. and Mastercard Incorporated to acquire cloud-based issuer processor and core banking software provider Pismo.”

“We modestly trimmed Visa Inc. (NYSE:V), Mastercard Incorporated, and Accenture plc to manage the position sizes and raise capital to fund purchases elsewhere. These stocks remain full-sized positions and high-conviction ideas in the Fund.

Another fintech industry trend we’re seeing is a pickup in M&A activity, most notably in the payments sector. The year started with Nuvei’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Paya announced in January. In April, Network International received an initial takeover offer from a group of private equity firms, which was then topped by Brookfield Asset Management whose $2.8 billion offer was accepted by the Board in June. Following reports earlier this year of a bidding war between Visa Inc. and Mastercard Incorporated to acquire cloud-based issuer processor and core banking software provider Pismo, Visa announced its intention to acquire the Brazilian company for $1 billion in late June.”