With daily tweetathons from president Donald Trump and the threat of Cold War 2.0, you could forgive a fund manager for shying away from the complexities of the US markets and economy. But not Felix Wintle, who takes it on as manager of the recently launched VT Tyndall North America Fund.
Well-known for his long tenure as manager of Neptune Investment Management’s US Opportunities Fund, Wintle has run a US fund since 2005 and has been in the industry since 1999, just a few months before the big dotcom bubble burst.
After his years in the industry and what he confesses has been a “fascinating” journey through economic boom and bust, he still does not tire of the opportunities across the pond. He set up a new fund from scratch with boutique firm Tyndall Investment Management in July.
The streets really are paved with gold in Wintle’s eyes. “For me, the US is the most exciting market in the world. Lots of people talk about emerging markets and what’s happening in Europe, but for me the US is the only market that offers you exposure to any investment theme you could think of,” he says.
Off the scale
The land of the supersize Big Mac meal is also home to a host of the world’s largest and most influential companies, the scale of which Wintle argues simply isn’t available to investors in any other region.
“Take a big one, technology,” he says. “If you’re running European money, there’s only a handful of tech companies you can invest in. “Tech companies are changing the game but if you’re not investing in the US you can’t access that. It is the same with healthcare, which is another big theme.
“Here you have GlaxoSmithKline and Astrazeneca but they’re massive companies who aren’t really going anywhere or there’s lots of small-cap stuff, but that’s really it.
“The US has loads of healthcare and loads of biotechnology. It’s the same if you go to emerging markets. There are large swathes of the investable universe that just don’t exist.”
It’s the reason investing in the US markets has not lost its appeal for Wintle in the 12 years of running his own dedicated US funds at Neptune and as he now strikes out as one of the founders of Tyndall IM.
Tomorrow’s world
Technology is a theme Wintle comes back to time and again during research on investment themes and opportunities, and he stands steadfast in his belief that it is changing the world.
Technology has become so much more than just devices, apps and gadgets, and is now inextricably linked to almost every aspect of everyday life, he says.
It is the top-down ideas that ultimately guide Wintle’s investment process, and he then gets into the nitty gritty of company accounts and strategy.
“We do it [that way] because I am interested in finding out where the world is going to, not where it’s been. What’s tomorrow bringing? Because that’s where the stock market is going, it always looks forward, never back.
“I try and identify where the big investment themes are and where they are going. Right now that leads you to technology.”
Wintle is overweight in the tech sector at the time of writing, with 28.5% of the portfolio in technology stocks against 23.5% in the S&P 500.
The portfolio is also heavily tilted towards large-cap stocks, with 63% of the exposure towards companies worth north of $20bn, 27% to mid-cap and just 5% in small-cap stocks worth less than $5bn.
