Top Performing CEOs in the World and What Top Performing Hedge Funds Think of Their Companies

Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, making high performance chips for advanced gaming and computational purposes. Its chips are used in a wide variety of industries such as automobiles, mobile phones, tablets, and super computing. Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun Huang founded the company in 1993 and is also the inventor of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). He has been leading the company for more than 20 years now and ranked as the 6th best-performing CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review. Huang has stated that he envisions vehicles with artificial intelligence that will mold to each individual’s preferences. Huang believes that the Artificial Intelligence powered by GPUs for self-driving vehicles will develop at an exceptional rate, and recently unveiled the company’s Xavier chips for autonomous vehicle computing. About 50 hedge funds that we track held long position in Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) worth $1.46 billion at the end of June.

Robertto Egydio Setubal is the CEO of Itau Unibanco Holding SA ADR (NYSE:ITUB), a Brazilian bank providing financial products and services to companies and individuals in Latin America. Setubal ranked as the 5th best performing CEO in the world, and the third-best in terms of financial ranking. Itau Unibanco Holding SA ADR (NYSE:ITUB) has performed well under his leadership, including posting gains of nearly 85% this year, though the stock is still well off its pre-financial crisis highs. The company has also been actively pursuing growth recently, purchasing Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C)’s Brazilian retail operations and considering a purchase of Banco Patagonia. John Horseman’s Horseman Capital, a notoriously bearish hedge fund, loved Itau Unibanco Holding SA ADR (NYSE:ITUB) in the second quarter, purchasing 4 million shares of the stock.

Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) CEO Lars Rebien Sørensen topped the Harvard Business Review list as the top performing CEO in the world. Sørensen has worked for the company for over 34 years and credits the ownership structure of the company for allowing long-term planning and implementation; the company is partly owned by a foundation which controls 70% of the votes. This has been one of the main reasons why he thinks that Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) has been successful, because he can confidently say to his shareholders that “I have a long term vision for the company.” The Scandinavian company has been an excellent performer over the past decade, returning more than 850% to its stockholders. Despite the ranking, Sørensen is set to step down in January, ahead of his planned 2019 departure, as the company faces U.S. headwinds that have rattled shareholders, which ultimately sums up the difficulties faced by all CEOs, even immensely successful ones, as shareholders ask “what have you done for me lately?” Novo Nordisk shares have slipped by 38% this year. The number of hedge funds in our database with a position in Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) remained the same quarter-over-quarter at 12 as of June 30.

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