With another February comes another quarterly disclosure of the holdings of institutional money managers with assets of at least $100 million. The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) requires these managers to report their stock holdings via Schedule 13F within 45 days of the end of each quarter.

In November, when these investors last updated their holdings (as of the end of the third quarter of 2012), Investing Daily’s Jim Fink highlighted four picks from each of four different investment gurus—Seth Klarman, David Einhorn, Julian Robertson and Daniel Loeb—to see what they can tell us about which stocks may be moving up—or down.

In that article, he discussed Seth Klarman’s new position in Rovi Corp. (NasdaqGS: ROVI). Since Fink’s article came out on November 16, Rovi has soared from $14.53 to today’s level of $18.24, for a 24.7% gain in three months.

These updates also give us a chance to stack these investment pros up against one another and see how their picks compare.

In the last three months, 13 of the 16 stocks highlighted (81%) in Fink’s article made a profit (a sold stock is considered profitable if it went down in price). The gurus also did reasonably well against the performance of the S&P 500 Index. Of the 12 stocks they bought in the third quarter, eight (66.7%) have beaten the S&P’s 10.39% return in the past three months. Of the four stocks sold, two (50%) underperformed the S&P 500, so the gurus were better bulls than bears.

In addition to Rovi, the “buy” winners included David Einhorn’s Computer Sciences Corp. (NYSE: CSC) (+35.9%), General Motors (NYSE: GM) (+11.0%) and Yahoo! (NasdaqGS: YHOO) (+16.0%); Julian Robertson’s Charter Communications (NasdaqGS: CHTR) (+15.7%), Priceline.com (NasdaqGS: PCLN) (+12.5%) and Ocwen Financial (NYSE: OCN) (+16.5%); and Daniel Loeb’s AIG (NYSE: AIG) (+19.2%).

Losing trades included Daniel Loeb’s increased position in Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL), which has plunged 18.7% in the last three months. On the sell side, Seth Klarman missed out on a big gain by cutting back on Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), which has risen 27.0%, and Julian Robertson is likely regretting lowering his interest in Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), which has soared 34.1%.

Of the four, Seth Klarman stood out as a laggard for the third consecutive quarter. Of his two buys, only Rovi, beat the S&P 500, while shares Idenix Pharmaceuticals (NasdaqGS: IDIX) badly underperformed, rising less than 1% in the past three months. In addition to the above-mentioned ill-timed sale of Hewlett-Packard, he also sold Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT), which went on to post a 4.9% gain.

These miscues illustrate how important it is to do your own research and not merely follow the actions of investment pros, no matter how distinguished they may be; in addition, it’s important to keep in mind that these 13F filings are usually out of date by the time they are released and likely don’t paint an up-to-the-minute picture of each investor’s holdings.

Nevertheless, they are still a gold mine of information as to what the smartest investors are buying and selling. A timely review of them can make you money. With that in mind, here are some highlights from all four investors’ just-released 13F filings.

Note that the following is not a full account of these gurus’ transactions, just a few that are worth noting. If you’re keen to see what picks the cream of the investment crop are making these days (and who isn’t?), read on.

What do you think of this article? Please post your feedback in the “comments” section below!