Terry Smith has dumped his stake in Becton Dickinson, jettisoning his fourth legacy holding from Fundsmith Equity in the last year.
In Fundsmith Equity’s September factsheet, Smith revealed he had sold out of the $70bn US syringe maker.
Becton Dickson was among the £26.9bn fund’s top 10 investments after the fund debuted in November 2010. At that time shares in the company were trading at $76 on the New York Stock Exchange. Since then, they have more than tripled to $244 a piece.
Becton Dickson is the latest of Smith’s longstanding holdings to get the boot. He has jettisoned Intertek and Sage from the fund this year and in 2020 he sold out of Reckitt Benckiser.
As he has been whittling down his legacy holdings, Smith has stocked up on new investments for the fund.
In February he added Church & Dwight, owner of consumer brands such as Trojan and Oxiclean. He purchased Nike and Starbucks in March 2020 off the back of share price weakness during the Covid crash and in December scooped up French luxury goods giant LVMH.
In Fundsmith Equity’s latest factsheet Smith said he had been buying a new position for the fund but would not identify the company until “we have accumulated our desired weighting”.
In July’s update, he alluded to another mystery holding he had started to invest in.
Last month Amadeus, Diageo, Church & Dwight, Intercontinental Hotels and Pepsico were Fundsmith Equity’s top contributors to performance. Paypal, Facebook, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and Idexx were the biggest laggards.
Fundsmith Equity is firmly in the top quartile of the IA Global sector over three and five years, according to Trustnet. But on a 12-month view it has seen performance wobble, returning 19.7% versus the average fund’s gains of 23.7%.
