Manchester & London Inve... Share Discussion Threads

[takeiteasy] 02/5/2024 14:40

I am genuinley fine with your point of view as this is why I came in here at the outset. I think this IT with all derivative based hedging that they do offers a proxy for a hedge fund type approach which is pretty much unique I think in UK IT sector. So another tick for this.

I think the margins over time may erode in the chip world as more players try to share the spoils so would like more balance between pure chip firms and other sectors - that is all. We are very heavily weighted chip wise and look at AMD huge fall recently. I would very much hope at the next factsheet this is a lot smaller than 10% given the uncertainties :)

I am not here to suggest the portfolio of course, we pay people for that. But our manager constantly tweets why he likes what he sees and in the spirit of open debate I provide some comments...

dyor etc

[iminterested] 02/5/2024 13:33

I have invested in hedge funds since the 90’s and gladly paid 2/20 for outperformance. I have seen some lose money and some very successful ones return money.
In every case I paid for something unique and as most of my investments are 3-10 years . Permanent capital is different. Pershing Square had their discount go from-24 out -40 and as stated before far more resources than Mnl. Changing the profile of the fund just might lead to less performance See Mnl comments about Bill Gates diversification and loss by sellin msft

[takeiteasy] 02/5/2024 11:07

I am fine to agree to disagree - I am sure over the longer term all the names in the portfolio may well be ok, but to keep a degree of outperformance in the interim we need to do more than just put half the portfolio in two names imvho.

I have done all my buying here - first buys were around 3.50 and some on the way up. If anything I will take some profits over the next 12-24 months.

MNL have categorically stated they do not plan to do any sort of buy back, hence you see all the director purchases as a lower cost proxy as they want to avoid all the extra reporting/admin costs of buy backs via LSE :)

[iminterested] 02/5/2024 06:21

I disagree
If you want a normalised structure
Honestly
There are normal tech funds.
By example
I sold Polar Tech last year to buy MNL
MNL outperformed
Easy you contribute to this site well
But the managers are exactly that
There are many funds that for many reasons trade at - 20%
So What
If Mnl start a share buyback that’s accretive
I have continued to buy more at -20
Because it’s good value
I also like the fact that the managers spent time educating themselves at university
How many others do that
AGAIN
Pershing Square trades at -27%
In the ftse 100
Finally may I ask
Why you do not take advantage of the discount and buy more?
How much stock do you own?
Are you only looking for the discount to narrow?
DYOR

[takeiteasy] 02/5/2024 05:04

Tweet yesterday from our managers

Stage 2 of our Investment Thesis is playing out:
Microsoft and Alphabet sent a clear message to investors: Our spending on AI and cloud computing is paying off

So this is on their radar - longer term I want this to be a nicely balanced fund and not feel a close copy of the SOXX microchip ETF, but our manager knows all this.

I think there are a number like PLTR for them to consider. This is not one I follow closely.

Amazon and Google are powering ahead better than some of the pure chip plays and certainly well ahead of MSFT


so hopefully this is being clocked too - some here like the highly concetrated holdings approach. I for one would much prefer a more normalised structure now that the number of AI winners are being spread out more by sector and globally. Not everyone's view I fully accept. My sense is it is mainly for this reason we continue to have the near 20% discount - but we will never know if we keep to the current approach and the dscount remains wide.

[shavian] 01/5/2024 22:27

Hopefully including PLTR before it blows

[takeiteasy] 01/5/2024 19:11

Deffo magic :)


Certain things stand out strongly to me in all recent market moves:

- AI infrastructure capex in the largest cloud providers is highly significant and rising i.e. background still very supportive

- Implementation activity is weighted more to H2 2024 than H1 2024 - and 2025 should be better still

-Traders seem in aggregate highly leveraged to market movements in the big AI names resulting is huge up and down swings taking stocks through all range of support and resistance levels (as a longer term investor I have to try to filter this noise out)

- Our manager is doing a sterling job of trying to manage the drawdown risk and the fact we had next to zero asset value move over the past 7 days I suspect means he has been trading his options and index shorts to balance the long positions movements

-At some point shortly I suspect our manager will swing the portfolio into stage 2 developments and invest in companies that more directly will benefit from AI


dyor and no advice

[shavian] 01/5/2024 05:48

Had my first practical, if comparatively trivial, benefit from AI last week. I was advertising some old RAF kit on EBay and it invited me to use its AI enhancement tool to polish up my description of the my old greatcoat. Within seconds I had a full and colourful account of its place in history. Magic, or what?

[takeiteasy] 28/4/2024 05:59

AI use cases expanding across different industries :)

hxxps://diginomica.com/sanctuary-ai-ceo-robots-really-are-coming-thanks-transformer-ai


hxxps://www.defenseone.com/technology/2024/04/man-vs-machine-ai-agents-take-human-pilot-dogfight/395930/





dyor etc

[takeiteasy] 26/4/2024 14:11

nvidia at 855 back above 50 day moving average of 540 - some pullback up from earlier the week ... the technical chartists I follow say they turn more bullish once this level holds (more so if we pass 20 day ma at 880)dyor and no advice

[jasperthemonkeygod] 26/4/2024 10:13

wrong thread!

[takeiteasy] 26/4/2024 04:33

To add a further quote from the article...

It spent about the same about the same amount—-around $12 billion—as Microsoft investing in infrastructure like servers and datacenters last quarter. But the results and comments on Thursday suggest that Microsoft is further along in delivering a payoff.

For now, shareholders are giving both companies leeway. At the close of Thursday, Microsoft shares were up 35 percent over the past year, and Alphabet 51 percent over the past year. They are both at or near all-time highs. But if customers keep flocking to Copilot and the prospects for Gemini and Google search don’t grow more clear, the trendlines soon could diverge.

So, near term Google has done better, but what is the long term probability - we sit here with 4% in Google and 27% in Microsoft. Dyor - but for me our manager's approach is being vindicated :)

[takeiteasy] 26/4/2024 04:27

"It is also critical for the Fund that there is no air pocket in the Quarterly Revenues at Nvidia as they introduce the Blackwell architecture chips which will
succeed the current Hopper architecture." factsheet update this month.

A very incisive point. Bear traders have pushed the stock below all the various support levels until they have as of last night gone into a bigger retreat.


Microsoft, Meta and Tesla to name but 3 mega caps have all confirmed higher and longer term AI capex investments - all including at the heart Nvidia chips.

Microsoft and Google had excellent results last night beating forecasts.

The other big fear from the bears was that the AI use cases were not strong enough yet to justify the returns - Microsoft helpfully for investors here showed very high activity levels with AI use cases.



APR 25, 2024 9:29 PM
Google Thinks It Can Cash In on Generative AI. Microsoft Already Has
While both Alphabet and Microsoft boasted strong quarterly earnings, only one tech giant showed that its generative AI bet is starting to pay off.

"Among Fortune 500 companies, 60 percent are using Copilot for Microsoft Office 365, a virtual assistant that uses generative AI to help workers write emails and documents, and 65 percent are using a Microsoft Azure Cloud service that enables them to access generative AI software from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. “Azure has become a port of call for pretty much anybody who is doing an AI project,” Nadella said. The $13 billion dollars Microsoft has invested in OpenAI has certainly helped win those clients."


So, we run a risk that we have not had AMD/Nvidia results to confirm the thesis, but the possible "elephant in the room" over the long term value add for AI is being built quickly by Microsoft. We do have assurances over AI capex for the largest players out there.

Helpfully to cap a very helpful week for the fund we dodged the big drops on Intel and Meta by not having them in the portfolio.

The reason I have stopped trading this IT is that when turning points occur, they are picked up sometimes quickly and it is hard to get back a position I may have sold. Let's see for example today what price you can buy back in size with our AI thesis back on track.

Dyor and no advice intended.

[takeiteasy] 19/4/2024 11:49

hxxps://www.tipranks.com/news/citi-analyst-remains-bullish-on-microsoft-nasdaqmsft-citing-ai-and-azure-growth

hxxps://www.tipranks.com/news/the-fly/microsoft-internally-targeting-1-8m-gpus-by-december-insider-says

Microsoft (MSFT) intends to triple the amount of GPUs it has this year, having set an internal target of 1.8M GPUs by December 2024, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reports, citing a document. The company is aiming to make generative AI faster, better, and cheaper, but the effort requires the company to buy the chips, primarily from designer Nvidia (NVDA), the author notes

dyor etc

[takeiteasy] 19/4/2024 07:54

Our manager helpfully answers the question in my post 504 - interesting the text he highlights in yellow. Perhaps he does read this board at times :)

dyor and no advice

[takeiteasy] 18/4/2024 09:51

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ORACLE-CORPORATION-13620698/news/Oracle-to-Invest-More-Than-8-Billion-in-Cloud-Computing-and-AI-in-Japan-46462323/one of our smaller holdings dyor etc

[takeiteasy] 17/4/2024 14:40

nav update today moved 1% over the week leaving discount around 20%

[takeiteasy] 16/4/2024 17:44

hxxps://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/amd-s-stock-can-surge-40-this-new-bull-says-even-as-nvidia-still-dominates/ar-BB1lIFnh

dyor etc