LVS Advisory, a New York City-based full-service investment firm, recently released its first-quarter 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the first quarter of 2025, the LVS Event-Driven portfolio returned 0.8% (net of fees) and the LVS Growth Portfolio delivered 0.3%, net of all fees and expenses. This compared to 0.9% return for the high-yield bond index and 4.3% decline for the S&P 500 index. For more information on the fund’s top picks in 2025, please check its top five holdings.
In its first quarter 2025 investor letter, LVS Advisory emphasized stocks such as ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR). Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is a clinical research organization. The one-month return of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) was -8.90%, and its shares lost 46.13% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On April 2, 2025, ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) stock closed at $168.70 per share with a market capitalization of $13.62 billion.
LVS Advisory stated the following regarding ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in its Q1 2025 investor letter:
“ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is a contract research organization (“CRO”). In the Q3 2024 letter, I highlighted our investment in Medpace (Nasdaq:MEDP) another CRO that directly competes with Icon. I became interested in Icon because we liked the CRO business model (after learning about Medpace) and felt that the industry would benefit from long-term tailwinds. However, Icon has taken a different approach than Medpace.
Medpace is focused on serving small biotech companies with full service CRO work (read our detailed Medpace write-up for more context). On the other hand, Icon is more focused on serving larger pharma companies and has pursued an aggressive M&A strategy to roll-up the industry. For example, Icon acquired PRA Health Sciences for $12 billion in 2021. Therefore, we felt that Icon and Medpace were sufficiently different bets that were worth making. We purchased shares of Icon in March 2024 for ~$323.00 per share.…” (Click here to read the full text)
A laboratory setting with a team of scientists working on a clinical trial.
ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 46 hedge fund portfolios held ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) at the end of the fourth quarter which was 48 in the previous quarter. ICON Public Limited Company’s (NASDAQ:ICLR) fourth quarter revenue was $2.04 billion, represents a year-on-year decrease of 1.2%. While we acknowledge the potential of ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) 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 ICON Public Limited Company (NASDAQ:ICLR) in another article, where we shared the list of best beaten down stocks to buy according to analysts. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2025 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.