“You wouldn’t dream of sending out a [football] team with 11 strikers and… you’d be reckless to base your investment portfolio just on emerging-market funds,” Adrian Lowcock of Bestinvest tells The Daily Telegraph. “It’s also wise to have a blend of fund types so you can cope with varying conditions.” The JO Hambro UK Opportunities Fund looks to be a solid midfield anchor.
The £898m fund, which aims for long-term capital appreciation investing in UK equities, is up 22% over five years. By comparison the FTSE All Share is down 3%. It’s also up 51% and 2.2% over three and one years respectively, against the sector’s 41% rise and 7.6% fall. That puts it in the top quartile over all three periods.
Senior fund manager John Wood has a “winning formula in an environment of slow growth and higher inflation”, says Jonathan Miller in Citywire. Patrick Connolly of AWD Chase de Vere agrees. Wood “excels at protecting investors’ money when markets are falling”, he tells The Daily Telegraph. Even though the fund has a fairly concentrated portfolio, its volatility, “with [Wood’s] focus on good-quality companies with strong pricing power, is about the lowest in the sector”.
Wood is gloomy about the UK economy, and is holding cash (15% of the portfolio) while waiting for value to return. “One of the most important skills in fund management is… to resist the temptation to do something purely for the sake of being seen to act,” he says in FE Trustnet. He has no intention of changing tack and will stick to his “absolute valuation principles and wait until… attractive risk/reward opportunities emerge”.
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JO Hambro UK Opportunities top ten holdings
| Name of holding | % of assets |
|---|---|
| GlaxoSmithKline | 4.4% |
| Unilever | 3.6% |
| Compass Group | 3.6% |
| Next | 3.5% |
| British American Tobacco | 3.5% |
| Reed Elsevier | 3.5% |
| Reckitt Benckisser Group | 3.5% |
| Imperial Tobacco Group | 3.4% |
| Sage Group | 3.4% |
| BP | 3.4% |