Q4 2024 / Strategy Update

The artificial intelligence mega-theme remained fully intact in 2024. NVIDIA and the AI “hyper-scalers” (Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon) accounted for 41% of the S&P 500’s total return for the year.

A manager’s ability to deliver sizable outperformance over the past five years—as WestEnd has done—depended on the ability to identify the artificial intelligence theme not as another business cycle, but as the foundation of a global economic transformation.

Achieving this outperformance meant investing in leading AI players and companies developing models and dominating the supply chain, especially chipmakers.