The fund will be managed by Alastair Unwin, head of technology research, with Alex Portz as an assistant manager. Prior to Neptune, Unwin was a technology analyst at Herald Investment Management.
Unwin joined Neptune in May 2014 as manager of the company’s proprietary Technology Global Sector Model Portfolio. Neptune’s fund managers draw upon that portfolio when making their stock selections.
According to Neptune, sector-level expertise must be preserved within an investment team, and technology research has been applied across the entire fund range as a result.
The fund will invest in a concentrated portfolio of between 40-60 securities, considered to be in the technology sector. It will be regionally unconstrained and sit in the IA Technology and Telecommunication sector, using the MSCI World Information Technology Index as its benchmark. The annual management charge will be 0.75%.
“Technological advancement is gathering pace at an incredible rate, with the digital economy set to hit £3.2trn by 2020 according to recent estimates,” said Unwin. He added: “Having the expertise to differentiate between the winners and losers of this revolution will define investment returns over the next 10 years.”
According to Neptune, the next decade will see disruption within stock market indices driven mainly by advances in technology, and that carefully selecting the technology companies that drive this disruption will present compelling investment opportunities. “One key aspect of [interpreting major changes] is understanding the disruptive change taking place within industries,” said Robin Geffen, founder and CEO of Neptune.
The current moment offers a particularly compelling opportunity in the technology sector, which is still largely misunderstood by the wider market, according to Geffen. “Many UK investors’ portfolios lean heavily towards UK income funds and UK bond funds and are underweight in the US AND Japan. Yet this is where many of the key technological disruptors are found,” he said.
“There is a major risk that the broadening and acceleration of technological change over the next decade will weigh heavily on the returns of the stock market as a whole. By investing in those relatively few companies that are benefiting from this generational change in technology we believe the Neptune Global Technology fund will enable clients to diversify away this very major risk to their portfolios’ returns over the next decade.”
