Yesterday I attended the Annual General Meeting of JPMorgan Global Growth and Income Plc (JGGI). This is a global investment trust as the name implies and the meeting was a “hybrid” AGM with a number of shareholders present in person but I attended on-line. Questions could be posed on-line but voting was only via proxy in advance for those attending on-line. I found this a perfectly satisfactory arrangement.
The meeting commenced with a presentation from the managers after brief words from the Chairman about the recent merger of the trust with the Scottish Investment Trust which almost doubled the size of the company. The result will be lower management fees.
The trust is a “high conviction, bottom-up stock selection” investor with 80% active share, i.e. it is definitely not a closet index tracker. As one investor pointed out, this results in a high stock turnover as they are sensitive to changes in the current valuations of companies.
The annualised return since 2008 has been 2.4% ahead of the MCSI All Country World Index per annum but they slightly underperformed last year. But it has a good long-term record and usually trades at a premium to NAV.
The manager emphasised that they aim to own the “best” companies but talked about the 185 different data points they measure on companies re ESG factors – a very tiresome subject that is now promoted by all fund managers. I just want them to make money!
There were some negative comments on Apple, Tesla and Lyft (they prefer Uber). They like Amazon, NXDP, LVMH etc where they are overweight.
There were a few questions from the audience. One was is the dividend covered by earnings? The answer was NO. The justification given was that it is best to invest in the best companies and not worry about the dividend cover. Would it not be best to reinvest the profits? Most investors prefer a reasonable dividend and the company has retained profits from capital that it can pay out.
All resolutions were passed based on the proxy counts before the meeting.
In summary this was a useful meeting which was well managed. For those who want good international coverage and like active management this is a share worth considering.
I shall be tweeting about this report of course. Also yesterday Elon Musk suggested that he would introduce a subscription service on Twitter at $8 per month which would give users some priority in search which he considered essential to defeat spam and reduce the number of adverts they see. There would also be verification of users who subscribed. In reality he is changing the business model from total reliance on advertising.
I am all in favour of those changes. More moderation is required on Twitter and if charging helps to reduce the number of garbage and abusive comments then so much the better.
Musk is also planning to halve the number of Twitter staff. It’s not many companies that have so many non-essential staff that half can be fired. It will be interesting to see the outcome of these changes for investors in Twitter.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
You can “follow” this blog by entering your email address below. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.