Baron Global Advantage Fund

Investor Summary

Alex Umansky has served as portfolio manager of the Baron Global Advantage Fund since its inception on April 30, 2012, bringing over 13 years of tenure to the strategy. His investment approach emphasizes deep fundamental research, spending four to five hours daily reading with screens turned off to facilitate quality decision-making. Umansky focuses on identifying companies benefiting from disruptive change, particularly economic digitization, while maintaining portfolio balance and avoiding emotional extremes. His philosophy emphasizes patience and thorough due diligence, often investing in companies before they go public and maintaining positions for extended periods to capture long-term value creation.

Fund Strategy

The Baron Global Advantage Fund pursues long-term capital appreciation through concentrated investments in 30-50 high-quality global growth companies. The strategy emphasizes fundamental research and patient capital deployment, focusing on companies benefiting from secular digitization trends and disruptive change. Portfolio manager Alex Umansky's approach centers on bottom-up stock selection rather than thematic investing, with holdings maintained for an average of five years. The fund seeks to identify businesses with durable competitive advantages positioned to benefit from global economic digitization, artificial intelligence adoption, and other transformative secular trends.

ANNUALIZED SINCE INCEPTION	QUARTERLY	YTD
11.90%	22.62%	11.03%

Date	Letter	Tickers	Keywords	Pitches	Quick Takes
Aug 2 2025	2025 Q2	ARGX BB, DAVA, DDOG, GLOB, ILMN, LOAR, MELI, NET, NU, NVDA, TSM	alpha, fundamentals, Global Growth, long-term, volatility	-	The letter focuses on exploiting volatility by maintaining conviction in long-term global growth winners despite sharp drawdowns. Management stresses separating signal from noise and prioritizing…
Mar 31 2025	2025 Q1	0609969D IN, BAF IN, DDOG, MELI, NET, NVDA, SHOP, TSM	-	-	-
Dec 31 2024	2024 Q4	ASML, CPNG, INDI, MELI, NET, SHOP, TSLA, TTAN	-	-	-
Sep 30 2024	2024 Q3	-	-	-	-
Jun 30 2024	2024 Q2	-	-	-	-
Mar 31 2024	2024 Q1	-	-	-	-
Dec 31 2023	2023 Q4	-	-	-	-
Sep 30 2023	2023 Q3	-	-	-	-

Date

Letter

Tickers

Keywords

Pitches

Quick Takes

Aug 2 2025

2025 Q2

ARGX BB, DAVA, DDOG, GLOB, ILMN, LOAR, MELI, NET, NU, NVDA, TSM

alpha, fundamentals, Global Growth, long-term, volatility

The letter focuses on exploiting volatility by maintaining conviction in long-term global growth winners despite sharp drawdowns. Management stresses separating signal from noise and prioritizing…

Mar 31 2025

2025 Q1

0609969D IN, BAF IN, DDOG, MELI, NET, NVDA, SHOP, TSM

Dec 31 2024

2024 Q4

ASML, CPNG, INDI, MELI, NET, SHOP, TSLA, TTAN

Sep 30 2024

Jun 30 2024

Mar 31 2024

Dec 31 2023

Sep 30 2023

QUARTER	THEMES	TAGS
2025 Q2	Volatility Manager emphasizes volatility as a structural feature of markets, noting that rare events occur far more frequently than expected. April's volatility event validated their convexity approach, with systematic monetization during stress periods. December saw compressed volatility with VIX hitting year lows, creating buying opportunities despite short-term costs.	VIX Implied Volatility Realized Volatility Convexity Options

QUARTER

THEMES

Volatility

Manager emphasizes volatility as a structural feature of markets, noting that rare events occur far more frequently than expected. April's volatility event validated their convexity approach, with systematic monetization during stress periods. December saw compressed volatility with VIX hitting year lows, creating buying opportunities despite short-term costs.

VIX Implied Volatility Realized Volatility Convexity Options

Date	Pitch Type	Author	Ticker	Company	Industry	Sub Industry	Bull / Bear	Exchange	Keywords	Action
No Elevator Pitches found

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TICKER	COMMENTARY
DAVA	Endava is an IT services provider, which the market perceives as an AI loser. Since this industry bills by the hour, the amount of billable work goes down if programming becomes more efficient. The alternative view is that this lower cost enables different kinds of IT projects for DAVA's customers and the lower price per project will be compensated for by higher volumes. When AI just came onto the scene, large corporates delayed their IT investment decisions to figure out how to apply AI to their business. Earlier in 2025, we started seeing the first signs of companies beginning to commit to large AI-related IT spending. Unfortunately, the business uncertainty following the Liberation Day tariffs postponed this recovery. We think 2026 will be the year when Endava returns to growth. Unfortunately, DAVA has also underperformed its peers because of less-than-stellar execution. The company now trades at 0.3x sales, versus 1-2x for peers. We think that normalized Net Income margins are around 10%, putting the company around 3x P/E once the business stabilizes and rationalizes its headcount. It's even cheaper if they manage to return to growth.
GLOB	The capital was reallocated to Globant, an Argentinian digital engineering services leader. Macro headwinds and market concerns around AI's potential impact on digital services business models drove a significant drawdown in 2025, with the stock de-rating to 10x forward earnings – its lowest valuation in history, and a substantial discount to its historical average of 30x. Today, Globant's project pipeline stands at $3.7b, versus 2025's revenue of $2.5b, and we expect the company to grow earnings at a high single-digit rate.
ILMN	Illumina, with almost 70% market share in gene sequencing, has weathered a storm of life science funding cuts and competitive entries. While the coast is not completely clear, they remain well positioned to benefit from any acceleration in both clinical and research spending in the life-sciences.
MELI	E-commerce was another drag. Sea Limited and MercadoLibre struggled as investors became more cautious on discretionary spending and less willing to pay up for growth.
NET	Jennison also entered a new position in Cloudflare. Its network infrastructure delivers key applications over the internet in a cost-effective manner, with optimal security and best-in-class speed. They could be a big beneficiary of the move to agentic AI applications.
NU	Since our mid-year update, Nubank's shares increased 37%, bringing full-year performance to +63%. This performance has been driven primarily by fundamentals, with earnings growing approximately 42% over the same period. Brazil remains a powerful profit engine, with high customer engagement, improving risk-adjusted returns, and expanding penetration across consumer and SME banking. Mexico continues to emerge as the next major growth vector: customer penetration has reached ~14% of the population.
NVDA	Nvidia sits at the top of the S&P 500 as the designer in the AI ecosystem.
TSM	TSMC leads the MSCI Emerging Markets Index as the manufacturer in the AI ecosystem.

TICKER

COMMENTARY

DAVA

Endava is an IT services provider, which the market perceives as an AI loser. Since this industry bills by the hour, the amount of billable work goes down if programming becomes more efficient. The alternative view is that this lower cost enables different kinds of IT projects for DAVA's customers and the lower price per project will be compensated for by higher volumes. When AI just came onto the scene, large corporates delayed their IT investment decisions to figure out how to apply AI to their business. Earlier in 2025, we started seeing the first signs of companies beginning to commit to large AI-related IT spending. Unfortunately, the business uncertainty following the Liberation Day tariffs postponed this recovery. We think 2026 will be the year when Endava returns to growth. Unfortunately, DAVA has also underperformed its peers because of less-than-stellar execution. The company now trades at 0.3x sales, versus 1-2x for peers. We think that normalized Net Income margins are around 10%, putting the company around 3x P/E once the business stabilizes and rationalizes its headcount. It's even cheaper if they manage to return to growth.

GLOB

The capital was reallocated to Globant, an Argentinian digital engineering services leader. Macro headwinds and market concerns around AI's potential impact on digital services business models drove a significant drawdown in 2025, with the stock de-rating to 10x forward earnings – its lowest valuation in history, and a substantial discount to its historical average of 30x. Today, Globant's project pipeline stands at $3.7b, versus 2025's revenue of $2.5b, and we expect the company to grow earnings at a high single-digit rate.

ILMN

Illumina, with almost 70% market share in gene sequencing, has weathered a storm of life science funding cuts and competitive entries. While the coast is not completely clear, they remain well positioned to benefit from any acceleration in both clinical and research spending in the life-sciences.

MELI

E-commerce was another drag. Sea Limited and MercadoLibre struggled as investors became more cautious on discretionary spending and less willing to pay up for growth.

NET

Jennison also entered a new position in Cloudflare. Its network infrastructure delivers key applications over the internet in a cost-effective manner, with optimal security and best-in-class speed. They could be a big beneficiary of the move to agentic AI applications.

Since our mid-year update, Nubank's shares increased 37%, bringing full-year performance to +63%. This performance has been driven primarily by fundamentals, with earnings growing approximately 42% over the same period. Brazil remains a powerful profit engine, with high customer engagement, improving risk-adjusted returns, and expanding penetration across consumer and SME banking. Mexico continues to emerge as the next major growth vector: customer penetration has reached ~14% of the population.

NVDA

Nvidia sits at the top of the S&P 500 as the designer in the AI ecosystem.

TSM

TSMC leads the MSCI Emerging Markets Index as the manufacturer in the AI ecosystem.

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Alex Umansky

Baron Global Advantage Fund

Investment Summary

Investor Summary

Fund Strategy

FUND PERFORMANCE AS OF 30th June 2025

Investor Letters

Latest Executive Summary:

Executive Summary

Core Thesis

Forward Outlook

Investment Themes

Volatility

Investor Pitches

Current Portfolio as of ( 30th June 2025 )

Key Risks identified by Manager:

Key catalysts include:

Portfolio Implications

Ticker Commentary

Alex Umansky Top Holdings

Recent Buys (13F)

Recent Sells (13F)

13F Sector Summary

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Baron Global Advantage Fund