Harvard Management Company’s Stock Picks Trail the Broader Market

Moving on, Howard Hughes Corp (NYSE:HHC) represented Harvard Management Company’s second-largest equity holding at the beginning of 2016, the position containing 428,603 shares. Kenneth Squire‘s 13D Management boosted its holding in the company by 375% to 159,922 shares during the same period. Shares of the real estate company have lost nearly 35% of their value in the past one year and ended the first quarter with declines of nearly 6.5%. On April 8, the company issued a press release announcing the departure of its CFO, Andrew Richardson, later this year and stating that a search for his successor is underway. For its fiscal 2016 first quarter, analysts expect the company to report EPS of $0.62 on revenue of $217.82 million, considerably above the EPS of $0.03 on revenue of $155.09 million it delivered a year earlier.

Though Harvard Management Company had reduced its stake in the company by 47% to 2.16 million shares during the fourth quarter, XPO Logistics Inc (NYSE:XPO) still remained its top stock pick at the beginning of the year. The fund trailed William B. Gray‘s Orbis Investment Management, which owned almost 16 million shares of XPO Logistics Inc (NYSE:XPO), as the company’s largest shareholder at the end of December among the funds in our database. XPO Logistics Inc (NYSE:XPO)’s stock saw an over 20% rise last month, which helped it in ending the first quarter with gains of 12.66%. Despite the recent rally, most analysts feel that the stock can soar even more from here because the margins of the company are expected to increase drastically over the next few quarters and owing to the acquisitions that it has done in the past its EPS is expected to grow in triple digits over the next two years. The 17 leading analysts and research houses on the Street that track the stock currently have an average rating of ‘Buy’ and an average price target of $38.53.

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