Lindsell Train opens up £27m North America equity fund to investors

Two years after Lindsell Train quietly launched its North America equity fund, it has been made available to a wider pool of investors.

Managed by James Bullock, the fund was only made known to a limited number of investment consultants and existing clients when it launched in April 2020.

It is reportedly part of a strategy to build a succession plan beyond Michael Lindsell and Nick Train – both of whom have invested in the fund.

According to the latest factsheet, it has hit £26.9m in size.

The intention was to market the fund to external investors once a “meaningful” track record had been reached, which Train said could take up to five years.

However, just under two years later, both the income and accumulation classes are now available via Hargreaves Lansdown.

Lagging its benchmark over 3 months and one year

As a result, it is the first time that many of the fund’s details have been readily available.

The minimum investment is £500,000, with an ongoing charges figure of 0.88% – of which 0.60% is the annual management fee.

Holding 20 to 30 securities, the fund directly invests at least 80% in shares of North American companies.

By sector, the heaviest weighting is to consumer staples (27.7%), followed by IT (19.8%) and financials (18.5%).

The biggest individual holding is cosmetics giant Estee Lauder (7.34%), with American Express (6.24%) and Google’s parent company Alphabet (5.97%) rounding out the top three.

While it has beaten its benchmark MSCI North American Index over a one-month period (-2.4% against -2.8%), it lags considerably over three months, returning -10.1% versus the benchmark’s -5.8%.

Over one year, it produced a much more positive return of 11.7% but still failed to match the 19% delivered by its benchmark.

Lindsell Train North American Equity portfolio breakdown 

Source: Lindsell Train