Artisan Partners, an investment management company, released its “Artisan Global Opportunities Fund” fourth quarter 2024 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. US equities experienced significant gains in Q4, showcasing a strong year. The portfolio showed slight weakness in Q4 but posted a strong absolute return in 2024. In the fourth quarter, the fund’s Investor Class ARTRX returned -1.67%, Advisor Class APDRX posted a return of -1.65% and Institutional Class APHRX returned -1.62%, compared to a -0.99% return for the MSCI All Country World Index. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2024.

In its fourth quarter 2024 investor letter, Artisan Global Opportunities Fund emphasized stocks such as Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO). Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) engages in the research and development, manufacture, and distribution of pharmaceutical products. The one-month return of Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) was -22.49%, and its shares lost 44.95% of their value over the last 52 weeks.  On Apil 2, 2025, Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) stock closed at $68.24 per share with a market capitalization of $299.636 billion.

Artisan Global Opportunities Fund stated the following regarding Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:

"Among our top detractors were Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) and Danaher. Our core investment thesis in Novo Nordisk centers around the company’s growth in GLP-1 drugs. After a multiyear period of strong performance, shares have experienced recent weakness. Prescription volumes remain exceptionally strong, and the company remains supply constrained to match demand. However, larger-than-expected pricing discounts have weighed on recent earnings results. Then the company released disappointing weight loss results for its highly anticipated CagriSema product (22.7% actual weight loss versus expectations of 25.0%). We had been trimming the position throughout the year due to valuation but were optimistic that CagriSema would act as a positive catalyst. While we believe poor test design may have contributed to the disappointing CagriSema results, the fact remains that the company must prove the drug’s efficacy is competitive with Eli Lilly, which will take time. We further reduced the position."

An elderly couple receiving insulin from a pharmacist, representing healthcare company's successful pharmaceutical products.

Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 64 hedge fund portfolios held Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) at the end of the fourth quarter compared to 61 in the third quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) 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.

We covered Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) in another article, where we shared the list of best ADR stocks to buy according to hedge funds. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 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.