The billionaire behind Moneysupermarket, Simon Nixon, has more than halved his stake in the Fundsmith Emerging Equities trust.
A regulatory filing published on Monday showed Nixon had sliced his stake in the £260m trust from 7.51% to 4.13% last Friday. He subsequently reduced his stake further to 3.75% on Monday, according to another filing published several hours later.
He now owns roughly the same number of shares as fellow Moneysupermarket co-founder Duncan Cameron.
On Friday the trust’s share price bounced around, hitting £10.82 shortly after markets opened but by the end of the day had sunk back down to match Thursday’s closing price of £10.65.
The trust is currently trading at an 11.4% discount, according to the Association of Investment Companies, having narrowed from its all-time widest discount of 20% on 18 March. Its share price is down 10% compared with a year ago.
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Nixon and Cameron have been longstanding backers of the emerging equities trust since its IPO in October 2014. At the end of December that year they were the trust’s largest shareholders, with Nixon owning 2 million shares or 10.3% of the trust and Cameron owning 1 million shares or a 5.2% stake.
More recently Hargreaves Lansdown has become the largest shareholder, with a 10% stake in the investment company, according to the trust’s last annual report, while fellow platforms Interactive Investor and AJ Bell are the second and third largest shareholders, owning 6.2% and 4.3% respectively.
Smith owns around 3.2% of the trust or 847,000 shares.
Nixon became a billionaire after selling his remaining stake in Moneysupermarket.com for a total of £700m in 2016. The Sunday Times Rich List estimates he is worth £1.4bn.
He and Cameron founded the price comparison website in 1999 with Nixon staying on as CEO until 2008 at which point he served as the company’s chairman until 2015.
