Billionaire money managers often have strikingly different approaches to investing. Consider Warren Buffett, whose holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, only owns about 45 stocks at a given time, and Israel Englander, head of Millenium Management, who owns several thousand. Add someone like Cathie Wood into the mix, who runs investing firm Ark Invest and buys disruptive tech stocks for Ark’s exchange-traded funds (ETF), and you have three different investing mindsets.
What’s something they all have in common? They all own Amazon stock, which is a no-brainer stock for any portfolio, and they also all own young upstart Nu Holdings (NYSE: NU) stock.
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Buffett, or someone on his team, first recognized Nu’s potential when he invested $500 million in the company before it went public in 2021. It now owns 107,118,784 shares, or 2.2% of the company, although it makes up a tiny 0.5% of Berkshire Hathaway’s equity portfolio. Cathie Wood owns 1,238,918 shares as part of Ark’s Fintech Innovation ETF, accounting for 2.1% of the portfolio. Millennium owns 39,192,266 shares of Nu, which is a 371% increase in his position from last quarter.
Let’s see why three very different money managers are all excited about this growth stock.
Nu is an all-digital bank based in Brazil. It has also recently entered Mexico and Colombia, but they’re small businesses for now. It’s growing quickly in every way, and it has been reporting incredible results every quarter since it went public.
It added 5.2 million customers in the 2024 second quarter, reaching a total of 104.5 million. Most of them are still in Brazil, where it has 95.5 million, or more than half of the adult population. Nu was a challenger when it premiered just over 10 years ago, offering a simple and easy-to-use alternative to the rigid banking services offered by a handful of large, traditional banks. Banking was so complicated and expensive before Nu came onto the scene that a large percentage of the population didn’t even have a bank account. Nu has a leg up on the legacy banks since it was built to be flexible and agile, and customers are flocking to its platform. That’s something Buffett loves.
That leaves about 9 million customers in its other two markets, 7.8 million of whom are in Mexico, and Nu’s performance in Mexico has already surpassed how it did in Brazil at a similar growth stage. It added 1.2 million customers in Mexico in the second quarter, or a 15% increase over last quarter.
