Now trading at a near 10% reduction in Net asset value (NAV).
It is and always has been a very well run fund, giving excellent exposure to the AI and tech sector.
Imo, the recent bump in the road was unwarranted and an excellent opportunity to enter or add, pays a not too shabby dividend and i feel the future is bright, I don't trade this as i'm in for a long run and try to buy what i can on the dips. |
A welcome update, well done and thank you |
Ah that's better.
Suet |
Thanks, yes i've done that.... |
 Could you explain your investment process?
It is about identifying key themes and trying to ensure that we capture them for our investors in the portfolio.
We try to focus on large market opportunities rather than exciting niche applications. Our philosophy is that returns within tech are generally generated by a few companies. Therefore, it's critical for us to participate in their success. Moreover, we think public markets do a very poor job in pricing ‘blue sky’, binary stocks, so we tend to avoid those companies.
We also revisit stocks that haven’t acted well, because we might have got them wrong and either exited or reduced our exposure. But we don't buy more of something just because it's cheaper than when we bought it last.
Why should investors have a pure technology play in their portfolio?
The information technology sector accounts for 29% of the S&P 500, so you can invest in a US fund to get exposure to it, but you will be diluted by other sectors.
The reality is that tech is coming after some of those other sectors. If you've invested in advertising businesses or retailers alongside tech over the past 20 years, you have been caught off by e-commerce and advertising companies such as Google or Amazon.
However, the key when investing in a single theme is to make sure you understand that it is inherently more volatile than investing in a broader market fund.
Technology outpaced every other sector in the 2010s, which was a low inflation period. Can it continue to outperform in an environment where inflation is structurally higher?
In theory, tech is a deflationary sector associated with falling prices. Therefore, it may not protect you well in an inflationary environment.
While the sector isn’t typically associated with inflation, there are a lot of monopolies within tech, which means those companies have pricing power. And if AI is as productive as we believe it is, there's going to be a lot of pricing capture in companies that can deliver productivity. Another point to make is that the sector itself is far less capital intensive than it used to be.
Tech mega-caps perceived as AI beneficiaries rallied last year. Do you think this can continue in 2024?
We describe ourselves as AI maximalists, as we believe it represents the next general purpose technology. It is one of those unique moments for the tech sector. We haven't really been taking profits in AI stocks. In fact, we've been adding to our AI exposure so far this year.
The ‘Magnificent Seven’ are all perceived to be on the right side of the AI trade, and just to be clear, we own them all. We estimate they can continue to move higher and there's no reason why they shouldn't participate in a decent market.
That being said, the return profile of last year is very unlikely to be repeated, because 2022 was pretty awful. You can't look at the performance of Nvidia on the way up in 2023 without looking at what it did in the prior year. The same is true for most of those stocks.
What have been the main contributors and detractors to performance over the past 12 months?
In absolute terms, Nvidia. It's been a phenomenal stock. We were broadly neutral for the full year and overweight during the latter half of the year. From a relative perspective, it didn't add very much, but it has been critical from an absolute one. Our best relative performer was Advanced Micro Devices. |
Technology has been the dominant sector for the past 15 years and this may well continue thanks to the strong interest for artificial intelligence (AI) investors showed last year.
The outperformance of the sector has benefited tech-specialist Polar Capital Technology Trust, which has been one of the best performing investment trusts of the past decade and was one of the few close-ended funds to beat the Nasdaq index last year.
Below, portfolio manager Ben Rogoff explains why the tech sector could continue to outperform in the future, why he hasn’t taken profit yet from his AI stocks and why contrarianism is not rewarding in his field. |
I doubt it. Only the original poster can do that and (s)he doesn't seem to have been around since 2017.
You could start a new thread yourself. |
Over the 10-year period to the end of January, the trust’s net asset value (NAV) rose 602%. This strong performance has pushed its market value above £4bn and into the FTSE 100 for the first time.
Today, rapid innovation is propelling AI towards superhuman capability. While market fluctuations are inevitable, Polar Capital Technology Trust is well positioned for the AI era which we expect to be one of the most exciting and transformative investment opportunities of our lifetimes.
Ben Rogoff - (fund manager) |
Oversold for no good reason imo, and if anyone is out there interested i've created this just to add some decent graphs, MF has also done an article on this i found interesting with the Ai future upon us. |
What it does
As the name suggests, this trust invests in the technology sector. It was launched in 1996 and has been managed by Polar Capital since 2001. It has been run by lead manager Ben Rogoff since 2006, which signals a stable investment philosophy.
What I like here is that the trust is invested in a number of high-growth technology themes. These long-term trends include:
online advertising
e-commerce
software as a service
cloud infrastructure
cybersecurity
artificial intelligence (AI)
connectivity/5G
The portfolio contains 105 stocks, but the top 10 holdings at the end of January accounted for nearly half (49%). I do like to see a concentrated portfolio, as one spread too thinly among many hundreds of shares operates in a (pointlessly) similar way to a global index fund.
The top five positions are Nvidia (7.5%), Meta Platforms (7.3%), Microsoft (6.8%), Apple (6.1%), and Alphabet (5.9%). It also has a large holding in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), which makes the high-end chips for Apple and Nvidia.
Furter down the portfolio, there are interesting stocks like edge computing firm Cloudflare and streaming app Spotify. |
Any chance of sticking up some better charts here? |
https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/uk/polar1/rns_tech/regulatory-story.aspx?cid=677&newsid=1904887 |
Going to be in the footsy 100! |
Cinoib, I don't want to be a stick in the mud, but your numbers are waaaaaay out of date! A million has 6 zeros, a billion has 9 zeros and a trillion has 12 zeros. This applies in the UK and the rest of the World for maths, science, economics and every other discipline and has done since SI units were agreed in 1960. In olden times, a British billion was, indeed, a million million, but that version hasn't been used in the wild for decades... |
Great start to 2025 here |
Polar Capital Tech diversifies AI portfolio with power and networks
Fund managers Ben Rogoff and Alastair Unwin snap up power and network stocks that will supply data centres as US companies plan to hike AI infrastructure spending to $1trn by 2028. |
Todays Rns with managers report looks like a read |
A current discount to NAV of 12.5% is simply too large...markets have Xmas drift. |
Register for streaming realtime charts, analysis tools, and prices.
Hot Features
Premium
