Here’s Why Harding Loevner Sold its Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) Holdings

Harding Loevner, an investment management firm, published its “Global Equity Fund” first quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of 1.68% was recorded by the fund for the Q1 of 2021, trailing the benchmark, which returned 4.68%. You can view the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a peek at their top bets for 2021.

Harding Loevner, in its Q1 2021 investor letter, mentioned Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM), and shared their insights on the company. Exxon Mobil Corporation is a Irving, Texas-based natural gas company that currently has a $264.3 billion market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, XOM delivered a 51.46% return, while its 12-month gains are up by 35.19%. As of May 07, 2021, the stock closed at $62.43 per share.

Here is what Harding Loevner has to say about Exxon Mobil Corporation in its Q1 2021 investor letter:

“We felt that our remaining energy holding, ExxonMobil, with its stronger balance sheet, was in a better position to ride out the cyclical slump in oil demand and even perhaps take advantage of it by investing counter-cyclically. While ExxonMobil does plan to increase capital expenditure, we’ve been disappointed in its regrettable failure to address ongoing emission trends, which reflects poorly on management’s foresight. As a result, we sold our ExxonMobil holdings.”

Natural Gas

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Our calculations show that Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) does not belong in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, Exxon Mobil Corporation was in 63 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 52 funds in the third quarter. XOM delivered a 24.98% return in the past 3 months.

The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 231.2% between 2015 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 126 percentage points. We know it sounds unbelievable. You have been dismissing our articles about top hedge fund stocks mostly because you were fed biased information by other media outlets about hedge funds’ poor performance. You could have doubled the size of your nest egg by investing in the top hedge fund stocks instead of dumb S&P 500 ETFs. Here you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.