Marlborough UK micro cap growth- which class ?

C_Mababejive

I'm thinking of putting a regular investment on this in my sipp but its available as Class B (acc) and class P (acc)...

I realise this has probably got something to do with loyalty bonuses and RDR but not quite sure what the difference is ??

Thanks

ColdIron

You want the P class as it has a lower OCF. See the All Units tab

https://www.trustnet.com/factsheets/o/i3pi/marlborough-uk-micro-cap-growth

masonic

You should no longer be permitted to buy Class B units, the only holders are those who bought pre-RDR.

C_Mababejive

Why are there Global small cap funds (USA biased) and UK small cap funds? Is the UK a proven crucible of industry and development??

bowlhead99

Why are there Global small cap funds (USA biased) and UK small cap funds

In the UK there are only about 150 companies with a market cap of over a couple of £ billion, whereas there are 500 more companies on the main market with a market cap between £50m and £2bn, and hundreds of companies on the 'junior' market, AIM. It's not particularly surprising that UK investors would be interested in investing in some of those smaller or mid size companies and that UK fund managers would offer funds that do exactly that. So, why are there UK small cap funds sounds like a funny question. Why are there any types of funds?

It stands to reason that if you are investing in smaller, less well known companies there is less public information, less interest and coverage from the analysts because they are too small or illiquid for large institutional investors to bother with - e.g. the entire FTSE Small Cap index is only £60bn and AIM about £100bn, literally 1000 companies together having no more free float market cap than Shell and BP combined). So fund managers playing in that pool of capital will do their own proprietary research on whichever companies take their interest.

It's hard for one fund manager to keep on top of all the medium, small and microcap /fledgling companies that exist in their back yard (the UK) let alone the tens of thousands of such companies that exist worldwide, and many small caps don't have massive international operations. So you will often see regional funds put together by specialist fund managers who know their own region and market, eg UK, Europe, US, Japan, other Asia etc.

There are of course some, more global funds with a broad remit, because there's investor demand for that too. You typically find if a fund has a global strategy of investing in small companies they will have a lot of allocation to the US market because the US has the biggest and most well known stock markets around and it would be surprising if US companies didn't account for 30-40%+ of a global small or mid cap fund, maybe up to 55-60% if using a cap-weighted index. Many of the global funds will have quite a liberal definition of what they mean by 'small', especially considering they may buy something they think small and then it grows as they hoped, and they want to keep some of it. So a fund may hold a $20-$40bn company which is 5-10x the size for entry to the FTSE100 but still tiny compared to a $1.5-2 trillion company like Apple or Microsoft.

Is the UK a proven crucible of industry and development??

Yes.

As an aside, you're reading this website owned by Moneysupermarket, a profitable company which is about a third of the way down the FTSE250, with a market cap of about £1.6bn. Two billion dollars is definitely smallcap rather than largecap when measuring on a global scale. However, perhaps a global small cap fund manager in Asia or US does not know much about it so doesn't think to include it within their top 50 global best ideas from which they build their fund. Whereas a UK fund manager might think that a technology-driven consumer focused financial sales portal with resilient cashflows through a recent financial crisis is just what they need to balance out their portfolio.