This article can be read by selected Monevator members. Please see our membership plans and consider joining! Already a member? Sign in here.
Augmented reality [Members]
The Latest Articles
Essential Reading
Better Investing
Property Posts
Get Money Motivated
Monevator is a place for my thoughts on money and investing. Read our disclaimer. Subscribe to get all our free posts via email. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or via RSS. You can also send us a message.
Copyright © 2007-2024 Monevator. All rights reserved.
Disclaimer: All content is for informational purposes only. I make no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, suitability or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors or omissions or any damages arising from its display or use. Full disclaimer and privacy policy. This site uses cookies and features affiliate links.
Comments on this entry are closed.
> despite tens of billions invested in blockchain projects
The trouble with blockchain is that it’s a solution looking for a problem. And many of the problems it’s a solution to facilitate downright antisocial behaviour. I took a look at a blockchain-based DeFi platform, for putting an old video of a song I had. The obvious way is YouTube, but I have fallen out with YT in its screwing with my head and it’s intolerance of ad0blocking.
Anyway, I could have put this onto the platform. You can’t take it off, though you can detach yourself from it. I can see that’s in the nature of blockchain, once a transaction/hash has gone on it, it can’t come off. But you gotta ask yourself, how is a add-only video platform going to keep all that spinning rust turning, for free. Blockchain may be incorruptible, but it can go bust and disappear, as holders of Terra/Luna discovered, blockchain doesn’t solve counterparty risk. Value is a claim on future work and it’s only as good as the claim is believeable.
The antisocial problem? Four lots of Alex Jones videos above the fold in the display. Not my tribe, I let it go. There is a limited requirement for anonymity and openness on the internet, but it seems the greater the hollering about free speech and the First Amendment the more likely the need for a sheriff to run the hollerer out of town 😉
Fintech is nothing like this. I personally don’t want to do everything through a smartphone, but the overwhelming majority of people do. I wish you and AUGM well, and thanks for an interesting read.
I currently hold CHRY which I think is the most similar alternative to Augmentum – similar exposure to fintechs, though CHRY has fewer positions, and some of their smaller positions are non-fintech. Trading at similar discounts, with similar trajectories over the last few years.
CHRY seem somewhat more concerned about closing the discount, with a very large buyback planned with the proceeds of any exits. They seem to have a couple of plausible exits in the near future as well, and so I wonder whether the catalyst for the discount narrowing might be closer in their case.
That said, I’d been looking at AUGM recently as well, and this might be enough to tempt me to take a nibble.
@all — Apologies if this was a bit long. I aspire to make Moguls’ posts shorter, yet they keep getting longer! I’m enjoying rambling away from the constraints of SEO and the mass audience, but I don’t want to test everyone’s patience. Maybe I’ll try a shorter one and see if there’s a backlash. (One concern with a short post is the disclaimer-to-content ratio getting too extreme haha).
@Carolus — Yes I hold CHRY too from much lower levels. The excellent return is partly a fluke on my part, I just happened to buy this holding in one of the periodic steep drawdowns. It was crazy good value when I bought it (in hindsight) — something like a 60% discount to NAV. Perhaps I should have kept adding as the NAV plateaued but there are always other ideas and I don’t want over-exposure to any of these things. (I remember a couple of ‘screaming bargain’ investment trusts that never recovered after the GFC). I suppose I could look at CHRY in the future for Moguls, if there’s interest. I’d welcome the excuse for a deep dive! The governance story is obviously interesting, too.
@ermine — Thanks for the rather tangential thoughts. 😉 Yes, at the very least some of those on-chain content blockchains seem to need effectively-free energy to be viable. I wouldn’t want my music career/output to turn on the likelihood of nuclear fusion and an Ian M. Banks-esque culture of boundless resources either! On the other hand such technologies could well seem prescient if we ever get there.
You surely have a smartphone by now? 🙂 They do make a lot of things easier. For instance, I only take my wallet out of the house 2-3 times a year now, and even then I mostly don’t use it. And since I got an Apple Watch in turn I seldom take out my phone out of my pocket for payments etc.
Excellent article. Thank U. (Further to @Carolus #2): @TI: In a head 2 head of AUGM (37% discount to NAV) v CHRY (38%) any thoughts specifically on why you’d now choose the former over the latter if you were starting with Day One nil allocations to either?
Thinking back to the last Moguls’ piece, defining what Quality is (and isn’t) is very much in the eye of the beholder (e.g. is Nvidia really growth or quality, or just momentum; and how does that type of Quality differ from Lindsell Train/Terry Smith?)
Contrastingly, early(ish) stage growth has some agreed upon scope / characteristics.
So, whilst comparing IWQU ETF to Fundsmith is a oranges to apples, CHRY v AUGM is more apples to apples.
FWIW, there’s an argument that adding a percentage point or two of each of these ITs to a portfolio which is heaving with cap weight trackers could slightly diversify Mag 7 (or is it Mag 4 now?) risk but without having to leave the higher returns in expectation of equities for the lower expected return profile of other asset classes.
@Delta Hedge — Thanks for your thoughts. 🙂 I wouldn’t want to do an offhand call on AUGM vs CHRY here in the comments to be honest. I’d have to re-up my CHRY knowledge and then consider the relative risks and rewards (and I certainly would *not* be driven solely on the discount). And that would be another few thousand words haha.
Remember as you already know, Moguls is NOT a recommendation service. I am writing about AUGM this month because I thought there were interesting elements I wanted to discuss, especially in light of the tech boom but also its persisting discount. CHRY may well be a better buy here than AUGM – or any number of other stocks, in other words.
If Moguls is a valued-add (and I surely hope and try to ensure it is!) then it will be in seeing and thinking about ways to approach active investing.
Looking at particular stocks is a way of surfacing this. Of course I hope to discuss shares before they go up, rather than they go down, for the most part, but that is more a secondary attribute than the aim here. (If I was promising to pick and share winners you could multiply the subs cost by 10x if not 100x. If anyone could honestly promise that, would they share it at all? 😉 )
Agree with your thoughts on factor overlap. I wouldn’t say Nvidia is quality but it is momentum. Alphabet is quality and it was momentum too until recently at least. Agree on your fruit basket haha! 😉
Another really fabulous article, which I thoroughly enjoyed, thanks again TI. I like the fact that the Moguls pieces are deeper dives so I’m all for longer pieces in the Moguls section. Long may it continue!
It’s interesting that Carolus (#2) pointed to CHRY as a similar vehicle. There’s a cluster of growth/venture trusts and stocks that share a similar mandate and style. I see parallels with GROW, IPO and probably even INOV. No doubt there are other companies/trusts that operate in the same space too. The difficult part is choosing which one(s) to hold! I have a sizeable (for me) position in GROW, since I wanted fairly broad-based exposure to VC-style investment. I was put-off by the controversy that surrounded CHRY a couple of years back. But I’m still substantially underwater on my investment and waiting for GROW to, well…grow, after languishing on an extremely heavy discount for several years. My time horizon is multi-decade, so I’m willing to wait this one out and see what happens. I see a lot of potential upside with limited downside from this point onwards. Hopefully the same applies to AUGM.
I wonder why these active investing posts have a small(er) comment section. Part of what prompted me to comment, to say don’t let that hold you back TI! Great post.
> Big players seem more ready nowadays to buy fintechs, rather than struggling to twist their legacy systems into shape to compete.
I’m not sure about that. I think big companies have stopped buying small ones – they just build ‘challenger’ companies instead.
JPM didn’t buy one, they built Chase from scratch (although they did buy Nutmeg!). AJ Bell could have bought one but built Dodl. FreeTrade was ripe for acquisition and yet is still on the shelf. NatWest markets could’ve bought one but built Bo (RIP now), and Mettle for business banking.
Re crypto risk – I highly doubt that Bitcoin will eat UK fintech’s lunch. Maybe there is an element of offering better value in cross-border payments or as part of an AI-agent driven online economy. But for the classic UK fintech scale-up, the current crypto solutions are much worse. Where to start – user interface, UX, bad rep, not to mention being subject to CGT tax on every transaction. And that’s from someone who’s bullish bitcoin and L2 🙂
In fact, crypto solutions might present *better* opportunities for such VCs to invest in, as the fintech pie grows. There’s currently a lot of development going on in L2 BTC solutions, versus 2 years ago.
Good margin of safety in AUGM. Thanks for the insights. Please do one on CHRY too, it’d be very interesting.
I bought into HG capital when it went to a reasonable discount around a year ago, it’s done well so far . Have you considered HGT ? Still on a 12% discount
I preferred the focus on duller workaday business solutions rather than the latest and greatest new thing .. that’s undoubtedly a personal bias though after 20 years in the business software world ending in a successful buyout
Have to say fintech does have some appeal though based on using WISE which I’ve found to be a great tool if you travel a lot .
@TI for what it’s worth, whilst I’d be interested to see how shorter writeups work, I don’t see an inherent problem with the article length – it’s better to cover more ground than just skim over.
@DH I currently don’t yet own AUGM primarily because I hadn’t looked at it in as much depth. A handful of distinctions I can see
– obviously the portfolios are different
– AUGM’s reported NAV has consistently risen, CHRY’s fell substantially from 2021-23
– CHRY’s fees are, or will soon, be lower than AUGM
– CHRY seem to be focussed more on closing the discount (after building £50m cash, currently @£25m, next £100m of any realisations go to buyback on a market cap of £450m), whereas AUGM seem to have a bit more focus on growing the portfolio.
YMMV on which ones are preferable, both have their advantages and disadvantages.
@MM Thanks for flagging those, hadn’t really looked at them before. I think they’re slightly different in terms of sectors and also strategy (they seem to be happy to hold small stakes in hundreds of companies, and much more focussed on biotech). IPO particularly looks interesting on a glance. INOV looks pretty scary!
@simon I agree with your last sentence – I think there’s appeal in being able to actually use some of these companies, and see what their product is like.
@FoxyMichael. “JPM didn’t buy one, they built Chase from scratch (although they did buy Nutmeg!).”
Not sure what you mean. Chase bought JPM in 2000.
I assume there are less comments simply because there is a small readership of Moguls. TI would have a better idea but 8 comments for a Mogul article may well be a higher percentage than the total number of comments for an article outside the paywall. The number of commentators is probably very very small vs. the total number of readers. Most probably never even read the comments section.
Thanks all for the further encouraging comments. These posts are a several-day undertaking so I’m glad to hear some people are enjoying the slightly rambling style. I think I’d enjoy it if I was a reader/member, so I guess I’m aiming for people like me. But you never know.
Yes @ZXSpectrum48K is correct that there are many more Mavens then Moguls. Having said that the Mogul membership is a higher percentage than I expected. But I think there’s a decent chunk of Moguls who are basically passive but (generously! :)) signed up for the higher tier to support the site in principle.
We’re very grateful for that. I’m also grateful those people don’t pop into these comments saying why not just buy a world tracker, don’t be deluded and so on. 😉 I partly created Moguls so active investing Monevator readers could have a safe space, for our naughty sins. 😉
I’m familiar with most of the alternatives mentioned, and in fact either have or currently own most of them.
I recently bought back into HGT and agree it’s a very interesting company. I have a thesis that it’s basically a European Constellation Software — I’ve never seen it discussed that way, so it could be interesting to do a compare and contrast. There was an excellent podcast interview with the chair Jim Strang the other day, who seems to really have his head screwed on:
https://www.taml.co.uk/blog/far-from-the-finishing-post-jim-strang-hgcapital-trust/
Re: acquisitions, I agree there’s not exactly been a decapitation of the leading fintechs but there’s been a lot of smaller takeouts. You might be surprised how many smaller companies are swallowed up that we never really hear about — companies like PayPal and Stripe have acquired dozens themselves, let alone the big banks.
Re: the big fintech players, I take this as an optimistic sign for the further potential, perhaps looking through the glass a bit optimistically. If I recall all the rash of Internet savings outfits that sprang up a 20 years ago to rival the challengers, they mostly got taken out when they started to flounder. Perhaps those fintechs who are making it through this cash-straightened time still have much bigger and better things ahead.
It’s also notable that even when the big companies get some traction with their homegrown solutions, they may not work out. IIRC Goldman is regretting / winding back Marcus, for example, and that was perceived as a massive hit. But, again, some cynics might argue it’s because start-up fintechs have effectively subsidised their business models with VC cash, whereas Goldman is seeing the multi-billion dollar cost of acquiring all those customers as simply taking chunks out of its established units’ bottom line…
@ZXSpectrum48K I was referring to Chase UK, in the UK market. JPM didn’t buy one, they built it here recently. Launched it in 2021. £15bn AUM in May 2023 and 1.6m UK customers.
Fair point regarding number of comments!
I am one of those passive Moguls TI is talking about. Or at least telling myself that. At what passive/active ratio is one called an active investor? 😉
Interesting piece again. I like the longer articles that include the thought process and the pros and cons.
The startup I work for raised a Series B at the end of 2021 at a, well… adventurous valuation. Now they have been trying to raise a Series C for a year. It’s just not happening in the current market climate and little has changed since 2022. Most likely the current investors will do some bridging round to extend the runway beyond this year, while demanding brutal cuts that will crimp growth.
With follow-on rounds, a key thing to look for is if they found a new lead investor to anchor the valuation, or if it is a bridging round from the existing investors who might be more inclined to support a valuation above market.
Some 40M cash on hand doesn’t seem much to me vs. 25-odd portfolio companies, of which only a few are making money and the rest will all need further cash injections to survive.
Re valuations. There may be a selection bias in the exits; investors have a strong incentive to let only those companies exit that can at least confirm their prior valuations.
I find their NAV growth hard to believe. Surely for such growth stocks, going from 0% to 5% risk-free rate ought to have changed the present value of their portfolio very substantially, whether or not they re-rated before in the 2021 bubble. FWIW a 40% discount seems about right.
RNS today that Onfido has exited https://data.fca.org.uk/artefacts/NSM/PRN/202404090712PR_NEWS_UKDISCLO_0086.html
at a few % above the Sep 2023 valuation. Not an especially exciting return on the Onfido investment (they quote IRR of 6%), but sugests the NAV may not be total fantasy.
Peter Hewitt, who runs the CT Global Managed Portfolio Trust at Columbia Threadneedle, has bought Augmentum
Not sure whether this is going to affect Augmentum eventually, but Citywire’s Jamie Colvin reporting AJ Bell’s decision to restrict access to certain funds for retail investors including Chrysalis Investments (CHRY) (alongside with Bluefield Solar Income (BSIF), Digital 9 Infrastructure (DGI9), Cordiant Digital Infrastructure (CORD)). Fidelity doing similarly with AVI Global (AGT), MIGO Opportunities (MIGO), RIT Capital Partners (RCP) (astonished by that one) and Abrdn Private Equity Opportunities (APEO). Fund Platforms, by all means warn if you think a fund fails the FCA ‘poor value’ consumer duty test, but please don’t take the decision out of investors’ hands whether or not to buy it. It’s also a bit rich to hear that HL is now making investors do the complex products questionnaire for the same ITs when they promoted WEIF almost up to the fund’s suspension.
The “complex and leveraged product” (CLP) label being slapped on many ITs is very frustrating. As I mentioned on the BHMG thread, Interactive Brokers is now preventing me from buying shares in BHMG, but is allowing me to keep my holding and is allowing me to sell the shares I hold. The “knowledge assessment” that I would have to pass in order to be granted the necessary trading permission for CLPs contains questions regarding ETNs, warrants, discount certificates and leveraged ETFs. I have no interest in trading any of these products and I don’t know how to answer the questions in this quiz. Obviously, none of the questions have any real relevance for a trust like BHMG. When I challenged IB on this, they referenced the KID, which states that the company: “has as its investment objective the generation of consistent long-term appreciation through active leveraged trading and investment on a global basis”. IB will not budge on this and it’s incredibly annoying. I want my broker to provide me with a service (order execution), not masquerade as a financial regulator.
Maybe that’s another reason why so many trusts are lingering on exceptionally wide discounts? We know that ITs are popular among retail investors. If retail investors are now being blocked from the Buy side, no wonder we’re not seeing any substantial reversal in IT discounts.
@Mirror Man — You write:
Sorry about your woes and indeed you could be right about the above.
FWIW I can own BHMG on at least two platforms. It’s frustrating that the rules are being applied so arbitrarily, although on the other hand I guess if they were applied uniformly then most of us would lose access to these sorts of securities altogether…
The AIC and its lobbyists (and in turn the regulators) really need to sort this out. These products have been around for 100+ years (albeit not the likes of BHMG) and while they’re obviously not completely simple and anything like risk-free, what equities truly are?!
I question what’s being achieved here in terms of consumer protection.
Think I have my topic for next weekend’s Weekend Reading! 😐
Blimey, I feel honoured to be able to inspire one of your Weekend Reading posts!
It really is a shame that these trading restrictions are being applied so (over) zealously by the platforms. I absolutely don’t mind if certain stocks/products are flagged as high-risk or opaque. I will concede that BHMG is both expensive and opaque. However, lumping ITs in with discount certificates and leveraged ETFs seems absurd, since they clearly don’t belong in this category. I think it’s another case of ITs being, to a certain extent, unclassifiable. Their uniqueness is in danger of being their downfall. Looking forward to your musings next weekend!
@Mirror Man Thanks for the info – could you post IB’s questionnaire?
The restrictions are getting more and more bizarre. AJ Bell indeed block BSIF and CHRY without explanation, just a message “trading is restricted”. This is not shown anywhere until the last step of submitting the order. (Apparently it used to be totally safe to buy the same at 3x the current price though.)
Now a *good* service would be to post their research report on the IT and let the customer proceed with the order after acknowledging that they have read it.
I am hanging on to my bitcoin ETF (domiciled in Germany of all places) at a CGT disadvantage because the UK won’t let me buy this anymore, and I read that the crypto exchanges are now riddled with hurdles.
What happened to the “Brexit benefit” of leaving EU regulations?
Investment Week is behind a paywall but they give this snippet for free (12 April): “The requirement for DIY investors to take an online test before buying an investment trust through direct-to-consumer platforms risks worsening the sector’s decline, industry professionals have warned”.
MFID II + choices in how to implement FCA consumer duty being blamed in various articles.
Although perhaps slanted anti EU, This Is Money has a couple of pieces in Feb and Mar covering:
– Baroness Altmann saying the FCA had, “taken these EU rules and uniquely applied them in a way that disadvantages UK companies. It’s the opposite of what Brexit was meant to achieve….regulator has misled everybody by forcing the trusts to declare costs that do not in reality exist”;
– Baroness Sharon Bowles saying the FCA misapplied rules on ITs to make them seem more expensive, “killing the sector”; and,
– Baroness Ros Altmann, a former pensions minister, trying to push through a Bill to remove ITs from the PRIIPs and MIFID regulations.
It all seems rather odd, bordering on the ridiculous. ITs have been around since F&C in 1868. These are not (at least for the greater part) complex products suitable only for sophisticated investors.
Whilst there are good arguments both for and against closed end fund structures, this seems to me to be the Consumer Duty off to a bad start and reflects poorly on the FCA and the fund platforms.
I am particularly staggered that a broadly defensive, multi asset, long established, and both highly reputable and overall successful IT like RCP is having access to it restricted.
@Sparschwein (#20) – The questions in the “CLP knowledge quiz” are:
– How do warrants react to the stable underlying prices?
– Which of the following is a risk associated with warrants?
– A leveraged ETF aims to provide a 3x multiple of the daily return of the underlying index. The underlying index is 100 at the start, rises by 10% (to 110) on the first day and decreases by 10% (to 99) on the second day. The return of the leveraged ETF over the 2-day period (assuming no other expences) is:
– Assume a warrant on ABC share has a strike of EUR 40.00 and an exercise ratio of 0.1. The share is trading at EUR 45.00 and the warrant at EUR 0.70, resulting in a leverage of 6.4. If the share price were to increase to EUR 50.00 while the time value of the warrant remained constant, which of the following statements is true?
– Which of the following is true for Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs)?
– Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of warrants?
– Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of discount certificates?
– Knock-out warrants (turbos), like vanilla warrants, derive their value from the difference between the price of the underlying and the strike. They differ significantly however from vanilla warrants in many important respects, except for:
– Assume a warrant on ABC share. The warrant has a strike of EUR 40.00 and an exercise ratio of 0.1. The share is trading at EUR 45.00 and the warrant at EUR 0.70. The current leverage is 6.4 (the price of the share times ratio divided by the price of the warrant). If the share price were to decrease to EUR 41.00 while time value remains constant, which of the following statements is true?
– Which of the following is a risk associated with volatility-related Exchange-Traded Products (ETPs)?
Each question is multiple choice, but for the sake of brevity I’m omitted the answer options (@TI: If the questions alone are undesirable for your comment section, please feel free to delete this post.) Maybe these questions are relatively easy for an experienced CLP trader, but most of them are unfathomable to me and I certainly don’t need to know any of the answers in order to understand how trading BHMG works.
For full disclosure, and to make sure that I am not doing IB a disservice here, I should also point out that:
1) I am not a UK resident, therefore my IB brokerage account is linked to IB Ireland Limited, not IB UK Limited. Therefore, I don’t know whether the trading restrictions have been applied in the same way for UK clients.
2) I hold several other ITs on this platform, but it’s only BHMG that has been restricted by IB.
Turns out that IB have restricted BHMG in my ISA too as a “complex or leveraged exchange-traded product”. I can still buy it at AJ Bell. If that changes then I might have to jump through IB’s hoops too.
The questions are well beyond me, but this being multiple choice it should be possible to exclude the obviously false options with a bit of study; and perhaps put the remaining difficult ones to a knowledgeable community such as here.
Did IB say how many attempts at the questionnaire are allowed, and how many mistakes?
I somewhat understand that brokers want to cover their backsides. Many financial products have hidden risks, and some people.. well.. actual question on Reddit: how to get a margin loan on bitcoin?
It’s just that the way these restrictions are done is arbitrary, pointless and actually counterproductive. A system that deserves to be gamed.
One of the financial news sites – pretty sure it was CityWire – recently posted all the answers to one of the platform’s ‘hoops’ so that readers could qualify to invest in the illicit stuff.
But the platform subsequently asked them to take down the answers, which they did, citing consumer harms.
Not sure what the legal position would be, actually, for a publisher in that situation.
With my legal warchest consisting of about £50 and a packet of crisps I don’t think we can risk it here though!
If I see similar posted again I’ll drop a link in these comments.
@TI do you still have the now-dead link to that CityWire piece?
@Sparschwein — Unfortunately not, I’m afraid. I came across it during my endless reading and at one point it was going into Weekend Reading. But they they deleted it with an explanation why, and it didn’t seem worth keeping.
It was very recent, past fortnight or so I reckon.
@TI – thanks, I found the site but it hasn’t been archived unfortunately.
It was about Hargreaves who inflict questionnaires on IT investors too apparently.
The share price seems to be shifting a little – presumably off the back of an increase to NAV. There’s been some coverage of their exit from Cushon, but since this happened (and they were paid) last year, I don’t think it tells us anything new. Discount still at about 35% with the new NAV.
Meanwhile CHRY is suffering a bit from the problems at Wefox and neither of the possible exits have yet materialised. Don’t see either of these as anywhere near fatal – they’d already written down wefox somewhat, and I doubt it’s a zero. But I hope there’s some positive news in the pipeline.
I’ve also been looking at Grow, which seems to have had a slight revival – closing the discount from 70 to 50. But this is a larger and much less concentrated portfolio, which seems harder to make a compelling case for – there aren’t the obvious Starling/Klarna/Tide superstars, and they’ve clearly been more “optimistic” on a lot of their valuations than other companies. In a world where CHRY and AUGM are at ~40% discounts, I’m not sure how much scope there is for further revaluation of GROW.
P.S. @TI – I noticed that comments on these posts are public – is that intended?
@Carolus #28: I wonder if the persistent discounts, notwithstanding the welcome uplift to NAV in recent weeks (at least for Augmentum), is a sign of the snagging of the ‘capital conveyor belt’ for start ups, as this piece yesterday puts it:
https://open.substack.com/pub/randomwalkwithdata/p/its-never-too-early-to-go-public
Whilst, as @TI notes, Augmentum is not a VC fund, it’s easy to see how the pretty dire set of issues faced in VC land since 2022 could be common with those faced by this type of IT.
@carolus — excuse the brief reply, I’m currently in bed on my phone with I suspect Covid, but just wanted to say thanks re: the public comments. I did not know that (and don’t think they were like that a year ago, so something may have broken…)
Will ponder when better! 🙂
Cheers for your other thoughts, I own all the trusts you mention and the news has indeed been mildly encouraging bar that WeFox SNAFU. (Did you see the new Revolut valuation last week?)
Hope you get better soon @TI.
Thanks both for thoughts.
@Delta Hedge: Yes, I think there must be read across. Noticeable with CHRY (perhaps because they’ve been more open about the exits that they’re expecting), that Graphcore still hasn’t actually shifted, and the Klarna IPO seems to be pushing ever further into the future.
Actually, as I write this, CHRY have put out their interim results which include the suggestion that there is likely to be a “further decrease in the carrying value of this asset, possibly by a material degree” for WeFox :(, but that they’re hoping for £100m of liquidity in the near term from disposal and debt negotiations.
@TI Yes, saw the Revolut valuation – though in a way I think it highlights my problem with GROW as a long term play. Revolut are still sub 5% of their portfolio, and it’s just hard for any one company to move the dial.
Though I suppose the question as always isn’t “is it good”, but “is it good enough at this price”. I think at the same discounts, as they are now, I’d prefer CHRY. But I’m certainly kicking myself for not going for GROW when I looked before!