I attended the Annual General Meeting of Alliance Trust (ATST) this morning using the Lumi AGM platform. It was physically held in Dundee which is their traditional location and they intend to continue with that in future apparently.
The Lumi platform normally works well although there was a hiccup during the Chairman’s introduction and I had to log in again.
I have held shares in this trust since 2015 and am very happy with recent performance. The Chairman, Dean Buckley, reported a “very strong investment performance” last year – total return up 21.6% and significantly better than their benchmark plus better than their competitors. Good performance has continued in 2024. The trust has increased dividends for 57 years and the discount to NAV is only 5.4% and heading down.
Craig gave an overview of their investment approach – a global stock picking based on “high conviction” choices but diversified. They were underweight the “magnificent 7” technology stocks last year but that was offset by good performance in other holdings.
I will only report on the question I asked which was “According to page 9 of the Annual Report you seem to be selling the winners and increasing exposure to losers. Please comment as this is contrary to my investment philosophy”. The answer given was that “Individual stock pickers may have different views on this. But it only applies to stock pickers overall performance. It is just a matter of rebalancing the portfolio, avoids a big bias to growth and helps manage risk while lowering volatility.
Comment: It seems to work.
The meeting was well organised and managed by the Chairman. I am happy to continue holding the shares as a foundation holding which I don’t have to continually monitor. As their Annual Report says “Our ready-made portfolio does all the hard work for you….We provide a simple, high-quality way to invest in global equities at a competitive cost”.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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