What are the stories behind The Brunner Investment Trust’s portfolio?
Stock Stories brings you closer to the heart of our investment strategy. In these short videos, Co-lead portfolio manager Julian Bishop discusses Brunner’s top holdings and how they contribute to our overall strategic objectives of delivering growing dividends and capital growth for our shareholders by investing in a diversified portfolio of high-quality companies from around the world.
A Typical Breakdown of The Brunner Investment Trust’s Top Holdings:
Source:
Top 20 Holdings: Data as of 31.05.2024.
Sector Breakdown: Data as of 31.05.2024. Excludes Cash
Geographic Breakdown: Data as of 31.05.2024. Excludes Cash
Securities mentioned in this document are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any particular security.
These securities will not necessarily be comprised in the portfolio by the time this document is disclosed or at any other subsequent date.
This is for guidance only and not indicative of future allocation.
Explore the stories from inside the portfolio below:
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My name is Julian Bishop and I'm co-lead portfolio manager of The Brunner Investment Trust. It's important to remember that all investments come with risk. We aim to provide an all-weather portfolio that seeks to create wealth across market cycles. And to do this, we seek a balance between investment attributes such as quality, value and growth. Predominantly, though, we invest in high quality companies at a fair price and hold them for a long time.
We look all over the world for the best businesses for our portfolio. One place our search has led us to the Netherlands and the small town of Veldhoven, there, one company employs more than 15,000 people, or one third of the town's population. The company's, called ASML, which stands for Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography.
ASML has almost certainly been instrumental in creating the electronic device you're using right now. The company makes lithography machines, which use light to expose tiny patterns on silicon wafers. This is a fundamental step in the production of microchips. The foundations of our digital world.
The latest chip in your smartphone can have as many as 20 billion transistors, on and off switches essentially, in a space little more than 1 centimetre squared. As technology advances and the transistors shrink in size to dimensions literally a few atoms across, the process of creating them becomes almost unfathomably complex.
ASML uses light to expose the pattern of the chip on the silicon wafer. Hence the term lithography, which means stone writing. Because of the nanometer scale of the pattern, is far smaller than the wavelength of ordinary light. ASML uses a new form of light with a far shorter wavelength, called extreme ultraviolet, or EUV. Generating EUV light alone is an exercise of extraordinary complexity. The process involves shooting a tiny ball of tin, a 30 millionth of a meter wide through a vacuum at 200 miles an hour, and then striking it twice with a laser, the first time to pulse it up, the second to blast it into a plasma with a temperature many times hotter than the surface of the sun. This process is repeated 50,000 times per second.
This light is then projected onto the silicon via a series of mirrors which are so smooth that if they were expanded to the size of Germany, the largest defect or mountain would be just 1 millimeter tall.
ASML’s latest machine has over 100,000 parts, costs €350 million euros and weighs as much as two Airbus A320s. The semiconductor industry has come to rely on EUV lithography machines. And ASML is the only company on Earth which can make them.
There are no guarantees with any investments. And this stock story should not be seen as a recommendation. Instead, it's illustrative of our philosophy at the Brunner Investment Trust.
Disclaimers: Securities mentioned in this document are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any particular security. These securities will not necessarily be comprised in the portfolio by the time this document is disclosed or at any other subsequent date. Past performance does not predict future returns.
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I'm Julian Bishop, co-lead portfolio manager of The Brunner Investment Trust. It's important to remember that all investments come with risk. We aim to provide an all-weather portfolio that seeks to create wealth through market cycles. And to do this, we seek a balance between investment attributes such as quality, value and growth. Predominantly, we invest in high quality companies at a fair price on hold them for the long term.
Some - like Visa - are household names. There are billions of Visa debit and credit cards in use around the world and whilst the brand might be familiar, the business model on which it's built its success is perhaps less well known.
As one of the world's leading digital payments networks, Visa takes a very small cut whenever its cards are used at of the millions of merchants that accept them. These minuscule fees are multiplied hundreds of billions of times over. The combination of vast numbers of cards in circulation, issued by thousands of financial institutions and accepted at millions of points of sale, creates a formidable network effect that acts as a very powerful barrier to competition. And importantly, unlike most other financial institutions, they don't carry credits or interest rate risk.
Powerful structural trends have underpinned growing sales and impressive margins. As it appears that we are transitioning to a cashless society and the number of contactless payments soar. Visa is converting $18 trillion in consumer spending, from cash and cheques to digital payments and enhancing financial inclusion.
In many ways Visa has been a perfect investment for The Brunner Investment Trust. It's a company which is demonstrating competitive resilience and has a history of delivering consistent growth in revenues and profitability over many years. We can't predict the future, and we're not making an investment recommendation. But our belief in Visa's business model and outlook have made this a core holding for Brunner, and our all-weather portfolio.
Disclaimers: Securities mentioned in this document are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any particular security. These securities will not necessarily be comprised in the portfolio by the time this document is disclosed or at any other subsequent date. Past performance does not predict future returns.
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My name is Julian Bishop and I'm co-lead portfolio manager of the Brunner Investment Trust. It's important to remember that all investments come with risk. We aim to provide an all-weather portfolio that seeks to create wealth across market cycles. And to do this, we seek a balance between investment attributes such as quality, value and growth. Predominantly, though, we invest in high quality companies at a fair price and hold them for the long term.
A good example of our investment philosophy is Microsoft. It's hard to remember a time before the PC, and almost it's hard to recall a time before Microsoft dominated software. Unlike more speculative technology startups, Microsoft is already a very, very large, diverse and financially strong business, and people in companies around the world have come to depend on its software. At the start of 2024, there were more than 400 million subscribers to Office 365 it's well known a suite of applications that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams. As a digital business, each new customer has very low additional costs, which is profoundly important for the company's profitability.
Over the decades, its success has been built on its ability to create, adapt, and envision the technologies of the future - from cloud computing to artificial intelligence. For people, companies and economies, AI is a game changer. Bloomberg Intelligence expects generative AI to become a $1.3 trillion market by 2032, and by providing cloud storage and services for new AI companies and adding Copilot AI functionality to its existing suite of products. Microsoft has established itself as one of the leaders in AI, further bolstering its relationships with businesses around the world.
Microsoft's market value crossed the $3 trillion mark for the first time in 2024. It's been a standout investment for The Brunner Investment Trust. Over the years, it has been one of the largest holdings in the portfolio, and it has consistently grown its dividends over the past decade and helped us to grow ours too, something Brunner has done for more than 50 years.
With its durable business model, robust cash generation and reasonable valuation, Microsoft is exactly the kind of company we like at Brunner. Well, this is not a recommendation and there are never any guarantees in investment, its resilience in the face of economic uncertainty makes it a perfect fit for our all-weather portfolio.
Disclaimers: Past performance does not predict future returns. Securities mentioned in this document are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any particular security. These securities will not necessarily be comprised in the portfolio by the time this document is disclosed or at any other subsequent date.
The statements contained herein may include statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statement.