Key insights
- Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting increased its exposure to US defense stocks, gold, and rare earths, while reducing its position in lithium. This portfolio shift reflects a bullish outlook on defense and commodities, but the overall impact on US equities is limited due to the relatively small size of the investment.
MELBOURNE, May 18 (Reuters) - Hancock Prospecting, owned by Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has added defence, gold and rare-earths holdings to its $3.3 billion U.S. portfolio this year, filings showed on Monday.
Hancock added CrowdStrike, L3Harris, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and RTX as part of a $133 million portfolio shift towards defence firms and gold in March, according to a filing from May 15.
The company also added major gold producer Newmont. Hancock Prospecting has also taken a 6.3% stake in Rare Earths Americas in the current quarter, a separate filing from May 14 showed.
Hancock boosted its position in copper producer Hudbay Minerals by around 10% and sold all its holdings in Chilean lithium producer SQM, with which it is developing the Andover lithium project in Australia.
Its main holdings remain in tech exchange-traded fund Invesco’s QQQ Trust and U.S. rare earths producer MP Materials, which together made up 47% of the portfolio’s weighting at the end of March, Reuters calculations show.