Billionaire Andreas Halvorsen Scores Big With Small-Cap Stocks

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Viking Global Investors is a hedge fund working with pooled investment vehicles on a global level. The company was founded in 1999 by Andreas Halvorsen, an M.B.A. of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. With an equity portfolio valued at $25.81 billion as of the latest 13F reporting period, ended March 31, the fund has 27%, 16%, and 11% of its portfolio invested in healthcare, information technology, and finance, respectively. In this article, we’ll look at Halvorsen’s top small cap picks heading into the second quarter, which are Qunar Cayman Islands Ltd (NASDAQ:QUNR), XPO Logistics Inc (NYSE:XPO), Wayfair Inc (NYSE:W), and Esperion Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:ESPR).

Andreas Halvorsen

We track hedge funds and prominent investors because our research has shown that their best stock picks (their small-cap picks) outperformed the market historically. Investors would have outperformed the market by nearly a percentage point per month on average between 1999 and 2012 by simply buying the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds, despite the fact that 13F filings are delayed up to a maximum of 45 days (read more details here). We have been tracking the performance of these stock picks in real time since the end of August 2012 when our small-cap strategy went live and the results have been exactly as our research predicted: these stocks have delivered a cumulative return of 139% since then vs. a gain of less than 60% for the S&P 500 ETF (SPY).

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Qunar Cayman Islands Ltd (NASDAQ:QUNR) is a search-based commerce platform for the travel industry in China. At the end of the first quarter of 2015, Halvorsen’s fund held some 1.01 million shares of Qunar Cayman Islands Ltd (NASDAQ:QUNR) valued at $41.68 million. Halvorsen had added Qunar Cayman to his equity portfolio during the fourth quarter of last year and as the stock jumped by over 45% during the first quarter, he picked some profits by trimming the stake by 30% on the quarter.

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