Harding Loevner, an investment management firm, published its “World Equity Fund” second-quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 2.73% was recorded by the fund for the Q2 of 2021, below the 5.04% return of the MSCI World Index, and the 4.68% return of the MSCI All Country World Index for the same period. You can take a look at the fund’s top 5 holdings to have an idea about their top bets for 2021.
In the Q2 2021 investor letter of Harding Loevner, the fund mentioned Deere & Company (NYSE: DE) and discussed its stance on the firm. Deere & Company is a Moline, Illinois-based manufacturing company with a $106.1 billion market capitalization. DE delivered a 27.19% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 52.23%. The stock closed at $342.20 per share on October 1, 2021.
Here is what Harding Loevner has to say about Deere & Company in its Q2 2021 investor letter:
“In the US, where we increased our weight as part of our recent portfolio manager transition, two of our industrial holdings stood out (one is) John Deere. John Deere delivered stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings and raised its guidance for the full-year. Sales of Deere’s tractors and combine harvesters are underpinned by Chinese demand for agriculture products and the bioethanol market rebounding with oil prices.”
Based on our calculations, Deere & Company (NYSE: DE) was not able to clinch a spot in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. DE was in 52 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the first half of 2021, compared to 51 funds in the previous quarter. Deere & Company (NYSE: DE) delivered a -2.92% return in the past 3 months.
Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ small-cap stock picks managed to beat the market by double digits annually between 1999 and 2016, but the margin of outperformance has been declining in recent years. Nevertheless, we were still able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that underperformed the market by 10 percentage points annually between 2006 and 2017. Interestingly the margin of underperformance of these stocks has been increasing in recent years. Investors who are long the market and short these stocks would have returned more than 27% annually between 2015 and 2017. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 in our quarterly newsletter.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
