OUR PORTFOLIO

The view from our Investment Manager, 30 September 2019

Over the quarter, the Trust’s total shareholder return and Net Asset Value (NAV) total return were 0.8% and 1.5% respectively against the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) return of 3.3%. This brings total shareholder return year to date to 17.7%.

The Trust intends to provide investors with broad exposure to global equity markets and to be a core holding in investors’ portfolios. The global nature of the portfolio has helped the Trust generate very strong shareholder returns year to date and over longer periods.

The third quarter saw some interesting changes in market conditions towards the end of August and September. The market has been driven higher for some time, predominantly by strong momentum in larger companies, in particular, US technology companies. This trend has been particularly noticeable in the last two years but saw a swift and significant reversal in September. The divergent returns from different styles can be significant and persist for many years but unpredictable as to when their directions might change. This is a key driver behind our approach of balancing a range of different managers styles to control risk over time for long-term investors.

Throughout this quarter, the Trust’s stock pickers continued to find interesting investment opportunities. A number of new positions were established, including a position in KKR and Co. a US based investment firm, with specific focus in private equity and corporate buyouts.  KKR have developed a global portfolio of companies, totalling over 100, generating over 120 billion USD in annual sales.  Their portfolio includes UK based Cybersecurity consultants Darktrace and US based consumer electronic company Sonos. The largest single contributor to the Trust’s return over the quarter was Alphabet, contributing 0.48%, whilst the largest detractor was AIB group, detracting -0.18% from the total return of the Trust.

In August, we were delighted to add Vulcan Value Partners to the portfolio. Vulcan will run the same concentrated, best-ideas approach when choosing stocks, focussing on their speciality of finding high quality companies with stable values, priming their portfolio to take advantage of market volatility instead of being a victim to it. We expect there to be no significant change to the risk profile, liquidity and return expectation to the Trust’s portfolio.