I know that fund research is what will interest many readers so I am now progressing to adding fund commentaries. I will try and make them variable in terms of potential interest, so I have started with two very different offerings.
Funds
Blue Whale – or minnow?
A relatively newcomer to the retail investment market is Blue Whale Capital, a business backed by Peter Hargreaves who made his fortune with the Hargreaves Lansdown direct to the consumer trading platform, now one of the largest business in the UK.
The Blue Whale investment management team is young and has apparently quite wide experience. The assets they are looking after at the moment are not massive and likely mostly money from the Hargreaves family, based on what they say in their publicity material. The fund on offer is a global unconstrained growth fund with very high concentration.
From the available data, the fund positioning at the moment is strikingly biased in favour of US tech businesses. Now I have been telling people for a couple of years that big tech companies with high free cash flow (so Apple or Amazon, not Tesla or Netflix) are the new defensive stocks, taking over I think from the tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. But I am not sure that buying only such stocks at current prices with new money is prudent.
This question is addressed by the managers in the fact sheet material on their web site, but I am unconvinced at the moment. Intuitively, I like new funds run by younger talented managers. But the extremely narrow focus of this new offering makes me slightly nervous as well. I will be keeping an eye on it!