Would be interested in thoughts on this one.

I have held this for several years and showing a decent profit which I am happy with so not a fund I want to drop lightly.

However, what is raising a few question marks, in addition to the poor performance last year, is what looks like a bit of a change of approach.

The fact sheet states their “sweet spot” is "mid sized growth companies", but the allocation is 92% large cap. They invest in a “small number of stocks” - they have 55 holdings. They specialise in “spotting businesses before they are household names” - I recognise virtually every holding, they recently added Apple.

Maybe this is ok and in fairness they have stated the portfolio has moved away from the higher growth type stocks they held in the past, but the allocation no longer seems to reflect the objectives and if this is the case have they moved away from what delivered previous decent performance pre 2022 and their mid-cap bias and their area of supposed expertise ?

Maybe they are simply good stock pickers and this is nothing to get too bothered by although a fund manager changing approach is not usually considered a good thing.

I would add that the decision to continue to hold would be a lot easier if they hadn’t dropped 20% last year especially when considering the sterling tailwind.

Any thoughts and if anyone was a holder and dropped it, would be interested what you replaced it with.

Thanks

Existing thread here which includes comments from current and former holders OP;

https://moneyforums.city...thbone-Global-Opps.aspx

The mid cap thing is weird, it hasn't been a mid cap fund for ages and marketing it as such is very misleading. Kind of thing I'd have thought should get pulled up by a compliance team or something!

I imagine they used to run a mid cap/unknown company/small number of holdings strategy and as AUM has grown they've had to (a) go up the market cap size and (b) increase the number of holdings.

We've seen with Royal London Global Equity Select electing to soft close at £900mn that even in the IA Global space a concentrated strategy (30 odd stocks) that isn't just picking the mega caps does have capacity limits before the strategy gets diluted.

Rathbone Global Opportunities is almost 4 x that size at £3.5bn, so they've probably just kept changing their strategy to keep those lovely fees rolling in from investors rather than sticking to what made them good in the first place.

As per comments in the thread linked above it's an out and out bet on growth. There is no idiosyncratic alpha generated away from the factor, it's 100% reliant on growth stocks doing well. If growth is doing well the fund will do well, if growth isn't doing well the fund won't do well. That's not what I personally want from my active managers.