Phillip “Phill” Gross is a seasoned investor and influential figure in the world of institutional asset management, best known as the Co-founder, Managing Director, and Healthcare Portfolio Manager of Adage Capital Management. While Robert Atchinson, his longtime collaborator and fellow Co-founder, serves as the firm’s Portfolio Manager, Gross’s leadership and strategic vision have played a foundational role in shaping Adage’s long-term investment philosophy and reputation. The two met in the mid-1980s while working as Harvard University’s endowment analysts. Their professional synergy led them to leave Harvard Management Company in the 1990s, following public scrutiny over performance-based bonuses. With the backing of an initial $1.8 billion investment from Harvard and an agreement for the university to receive 10% of the firm’s earnings, they launched Adage Capital Management in 2001 alongside an 18-person team.
Under Gross’s co-leadership, Adage has become a key player in managing assets for prominent institutional clients such as Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, the American Red Cross, and the Getty Foundation. The firm specializes in long/short equity strategies guided by fundamental analysis and engages in risk arbitrage and event-driven opportunities when market conditions are favourable. Adage Capital Management and its predecessor, the Select Equity Group at Harvard Management Company, have consistently outperformed broader market benchmarks by an average of 3.5% over the past 15 years. This is a testament to the disciplined, research-driven investment framework that Gross helped instill.
Gross himself brings a deep background in healthcare investing, having served for nearly two decades at Harvard Management Company in various roles, including Healthcare and Retail Analyst, Equity Research Director, and Partner. His academic credentials include a B.S. in finance and economics (1982) and an M.S. in investments (1983), both from the University of Wisconsin. He remains actively engaged with his alma mater, serving on the advisory boards of the Steve Hawk Center for Applied Securities Analysis and the Nicholas Center for Applied Corporate Finance. In recognition of his professional accomplishments and ongoing contributions, Gross received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Wisconsin Business School in 2006.
Beyond finance, Gross is a committed philanthropist. He co-founded Strategic Grant Partners, an organization focused on driving systemic change in education and family services throughout Massachusetts. He also serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors for Youth Enrichment Services, a nonprofit that provides urban youth with outdoor recreational experiences. In addition, he holds board positions with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, where he is Vice-Chair of the Investment Committee, and with the T2 Foundation.
Adage Capital Management’s latest 13F filing for Q4 2024 reported $57.19 billion in managed securities, with the top 10 holdings comprising 31.7% of the total portfolio, demonstrating a strategic yet diversified approach to asset allocation. While Atchinson oversees day-to-day portfolio management, Gross’s enduring influence and expertise, particularly in healthcare investing, continue to shape the firm’s long-term success and institutional credibility.
Our Methodology
We searched through Adage Capital Management’s Q4 2024 13F filings to identify unknown billionaire Phill Gross’ stock picks with the highest upside potential. We compiled the equities with upside potential higher than 34% at the time of writing this article and discussed why they stood out as strong potential investments. Finally, we ranked the stocks based on the ascending order of their upside potential. To assist readers with more context, we mentioned the hedge fund sentiment around each stock using data from 1,009 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 363.5% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 208 percentage points (see more details here).
NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA): Among Unknown Billionaire Phill Gross’ Stock Picks with Huge Upside Potential
A close-up of a colorful high-end graphics card being plugged in to a gaming computer.
Adage Capital Management’s Equity Stake: $3.10 Billion
Upside Potential as of May 2:44.30%
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a global leader in GPU-accelerated computing, driving innovation across industries such as gaming, professional visualization, data centers, and automotive technologies. The company’s graphics processing units and AI chips play a foundational role in emerging technologies, from powering immersive gaming experiences to enabling complex data center operations and artificial intelligence platforms. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, NVIDIA reported a record revenue of $39.3 billion, reflecting an impressive 78% increase compared to the same period the previous year. Its GAAP earnings per diluted share rose to $0.89, underscoring the company’s exceptional performance and the robust demand for its AI and data infrastructure products.
Despite its commercial success, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) has faced challenges amid growing geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, particularly regarding restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductors. The U.S. government, through new Commerce Department regulations, now requires NVIDIA to obtain export licenses for the H20 AI chip, which was originally developed to meet prior export limitations. This development is part of a broader U.S. strategy to limit China’s access to cutting-edge AI technology while investing heavily in domestic semiconductor production. In alignment with this policy, NVIDIA announced a $500 billion investment in AI server infrastructure within the United States, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of its key manufacturing partners, committed an additional $100 billion to bolster its operations in Arizona. These moves reflect the growing emphasis on reshoring critical tech capabilities and reducing reliance on international supply chains.
To maintain its foothold in China—a market that contributed 13% of its total revenue last year—NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang traveled to Beijing to meet with high-ranking government officials. During his visit, Huang reiterated NVIDIA’s commitment to the Chinese market, signaling the company’s intent to preserve collaborative relationships in the region despite escalating trade restrictions. Nevertheless, investor confidence in NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) remains robust. The company’s stock has a bullish price target of $165.22, indicating an upside potential of 44.30%, effectively placing it among the huge upside potential stock picks of billionaire Phill Gross.
Alger Spectra Fund stated the following regarding NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is a leading supplier of graphics processing units (GPUs) for a variety of end markets, such as gaming, PCs, data centers, virtual reality, and high-performance computing. The company is leading in most secular growth categories in computing, and especially artificial intelligence and super-computing parallel processing techniques for solving complex computational problems. In our view, Nvidia’s computational power is a critical enabler of AI and therefore essential to AI adoption. Shares contributed to performance during the quarter, driven by strong demand for its data center products, especially the Hopper H200 chips, which generated double-digit billions in revenue, marking the fastest product ramp in the company’s history. Management provided fiscal fourth-quarter revenue guidance above analyst estimates, along with resilient operating margins supported by robust demand and limited competition. In our view, Nvidia’s leadership in scaling AI infrastructure, including advancements in inference and test-time scaling (i.e., reasoning during inference), is driving adoption among enterprises and startups, providing continued demand for its high-performance chips and software solutions. As older-generation chips are repurposed for inference and new clusters are deployed, we believe Nvidia is well-positioned to capitalize on growing compute needs across AI applications.”
Overall, NVDA ranks 3rd on our list of unknown billionaire Phill Gross’ stock picks with huge upside potential. While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than NVDA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
