Harding Loevner, an investment management firm, published its “Global Small Companies Equity Fund” fourth quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A quarterly net return of 2.86% was recorded by the fund for the fourth quarter of 2021, beating its Benchmark, the MSCI All Country World Small Cap Index, which returned 2.22% for the same period. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.
Harding Loevner Global Small Companies Equity Fund, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Altair Engineering Inc. (NASDAQ: ALTR) and discussed its stance on the firm. Altair Engineering Inc. is a Troy, Michigan-based software company with a $5.3 billion market capitalization. ALTR delivered a -13.00% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 14.66%. The stock closed at $67.27 per share on March 02, 2022.
Here is what Harding Loevner Global Small Companies Equity Fund has to say about Altair Engineering Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:
“Michigan-based Altair Engineering was founded in 1985 to provide structural simulation and modeling to the automotive industry, beginning with software that simulated the effects of a car crash. Now, Altair’s HyperWorks suite of software is used extensively by automakers throughout the design and engineering process, including for elimination of noise and vibration, understanding fluid dynamics, and thermal management. Carmakers use the software to design components that are lighter and more aerodynamic to respond to tightening regulatory standards for gas mileage and carbon emissions, and in electric vehicle (EV) design where lighter-weight parts are even more critical (for extending battery range) and noise reduction is even more of an issue (in the absence of engine noise to mask sounds). HyperWorks users can compare the performance level of different design features and identify the most optimal. It also offers a toolset for durability analysis including an embedded materials library to predict fatigue life under a range of conditions. Similar types of engineering challenges occur in other industries, and Altair works with many of them, including aerospace, heavy equipment, industrial machinery, rail, and marine companies.
Altair’s core competitive advantage lies in its “solvers,” software modules that use differential equations to solve physics problems. The company has utilized data from decades’ worth of crash tests to improve its core structural optimization solver, Optistruct. Altair has also been quietly investing in the underlying software tools needed to harness the power of Al, enabling customers to optimize the performance of simulation analysis regardless of whether they are accessing the cloud through Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, or any of the above in combination with the customer’s in-house hardware. This gives customers flexibility to take advantage of the increased power of the cloud while still amortizing their past investments. Recently, Altair acquired DataWatch, known for its live-streaming analytics capabilities, in anticipation of what management sees as the growing opportunity to continuously enhance its simulations with more real-time data from sensors embedded in its customers’ deployed products —an approach known as ‘digital twins.'”
Our calculations show that Altair Engineering Inc. (NASDAQ: ALTR) failed to obtain a mark on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. ALTR was in 16 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 16 funds in the previous quarter. Altair Engineering Inc. (NASDAQ: ALTR) delivered a -8.04% return in the past 3 months.
In February 2022, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on ALTR in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
