Weekend reading: Scottish Mortgage’s bumpy ride
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“Here’s what being sedentary does to your body”
Amazing that the WHO thinks that 73% of adults are doing 150 mins of physical activity and 2 sessions of “strengthening activity” a week. I’d be surprised if it was that high even amongst the disciplined self selected high achieving group of Monevator readers! The figure of only 20% of adolescents doing the minimum seems much more plausible.
Investment Trusts were one of the more exciting nodes on my investing journey-anyone remember the Turkey trust-I made some money on that but……
Never really understood discounts or rather why they occurred etc
I did note that Personal Assets Trust-the one Trust I might have used for my core investment doesn’t allow discounts to occur
Discovered eventually that global investment trusts that I was using were just expensive global index trackers (with or without discounts) and left the Investment Trust scenario behind
Sadly global index trackers are very boring-Investment Trusts were /are so exciting with alpha males(and some girls) pontificating continuously with glossy prospectuses -absolutely the investment area for active investors-of which sadly I am not one
I enjoy reading some Investment Trust materials still but I keep my distance
xxd09
Haha, I had to smile when you segued into AUGM after we had been discussing it this week under that old Moguls piece. Bravo, you have a journalistic knack for fusing several topics in your weekend post.
You’ve really hit the nail on the head. Everything waxes and wanes in the world of investing, there are no constants. A few years ago, I set up a mini portfolio of 4 investment trusts, which I labelled my “Future Funds” portfolio. (Yes, all of my sub-portfolios have names…please don’t judge me.) The idea was to gain exposure to themes that I thought could become increasingly important over the next decades (my time horizon is long) and simply hold them without trading. I used ITs and closed-end vehicles because I wanted to access opportunities that were not necessarily available in public markets. I went for AUGM (fintech), SSIT (space), HGEN (hydrogen) and ANIC (cellular agriculture). What a divergence in the returns so far! But this is why I’m frustrated about the AUGM take-out. Although AUGM and HGEN (less said about this one the better) have flopped until now, I don’t think the underlying assets are bad investments. Actually, I expect that the AUGM portfolio will do very well at some point for someone else, and there is still some hope, long-term, for the early-stage assets being sold off by HGEN as it winds down. So my thesis may have been right, but I’ll never be able to make a return on those two. That’s investing in a nutshell: having an excellent thesis and being able to execute that thesis are very different beasts.
Of course, this means that soon I’ll have two gaping holes in the Future Funds portfolio. In order to maintain a modicum of balance and diversification, I’d like to find a couple of substitutes. I realise that this goes a bit beyond the normal discourse in Weekend Reading, but…I’ll go for it anyway…any ideas, anyone?
Thanks, TI. ‘Worse on purpose’. Well, that’s depressing!
Are we sure that issuing new shares in SMT benefited existing shareholders? Around 40% of the fund is in private investments, which are difficult to value. Given that the NAV is only an estimate, I would have expected a greater margin of safety than the low single-digit premium.
At least, it seems that the board’s view differs from that of shareholders, many of whom are invested precisely because they believe the estimated NAV understates the fund’s true value.
@Mirror Man, may be worth looking into Schiehallion, ran by Baillie Gifford but focuses on early stages companies but holds even once they have eventually listed.
@The Advisor – thanks very much for the suggestion. MNTN would be a pretty good fit for the “future themes” mandate. I have to confess that I already hold this one in a separate private equity sub-portfolio. Others may find this laughable, but I considered it as too late-stage for the “future themes” concept, since MNTN has holdings that are fairly mature as companies (SpaceX, Wise, etc).
I’ve scoured around this weekend and I’m thinking that IP Group (IPO) might fit the bill. This looks like MNTN on steroids. Very early-stage, many spinoffs out of academia, actually some pretty far-out moonshot ideas being trialled. It’s certainly futuristic!
@TI: many thanks for the as ever excellent links: re: “in and out of fashion”: 1). Any take(s) on whether we’re more likely to be at the end of the beginning or at the beginning of the end of this NAV discount tightening cycle? 2). Are you seeing any sector differentiation on discount movements as between trusts?