has this bolted Baillie Gifford American fund

BananaRepublic

ZingPowZing said:

I agree, and am willing to bet 10% in each of the top ten shares will be worth more than a single investment in this BG fund on 06/01/22. 
But if were invested in this fund, there is no reason to sell other than tall poppy superstition.

I recall such confident sentinents during the dot com boom. In all booms it pays to take part as long as you bail out in time. 

Secret2ndAccount

Thrugelmir said:

Secret2ndAccount said:

The Kodak thing was mostly about insider trading, not RobinHood. I think Nikola would be a better example of RobinHood investors getting cleaned out

Buying into anything with EV in the description. For those who don't know, they put out a cool video of their prototype truck doing its thing. Turned out it had been recorded going down hill as it didn't have a working engine.

Obviously we read different news feeds. 

"As of 3:30 p.m. in New York on Wednesday, almost 79,000 users of the investing app had added Kodak to their accounts in some form over the past 24 hours, according to website Robintrack.net, which aggregates data from the brokerage but isn’t affiliated with it. The activity was 15 times more than the next most-popular stock, Heat Biologics Inc. Roughly 34,000 of the additions came over the latest four-hour span."

Rather late to be discussing events of last July. Hopefully you'll be subscribing to better information sources in 2021. 

Here's where I'm coming from:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/29/kodak-executive-chairman-addresses-jump-in-trading-activity-before-government-deal-was-announced.html

"On Monday, 1,645,719 shares traded hands, far surpassing Friday’s 74,893 trades, and Thursday’s 80,840 trades...

before the company announced on Tuesday that it had been tapped by the Trump administration to manufacture drug ingredients"

So, volume up 20x the day before the big announcement. It was Wednesday PM before the RobinHooders showed up. Those that did certainly lost their shirts though. Without the insider dealing, nobody from RobinHood ever notices Kodak

itwasntme001

Over the last few months I have been hearing from a few people I know that they have bought or will be looking to buy SMT because they view it as an amazing fund.  Not saying I disagree with that at all, the fund managers have certainly proved that they are good stock pickers, it is just that when you have people who showed literally 0 interest in stocks just a year prior, it makes you stop and think whether the high growth style funds/stocks are a bit bubbly...

I did sell some of my SMT very recently - it just got too much of a weighting in my portfolio.

Linton

Deleted_User said:

A pure growth play like this isn’t something I would buy but for someone who would... Why buy this fund rather than a few key shares from this fund? 

Because in a year's time the fund may be invested differently.  Would you be?  With the fund you can be pretty confident that someone who understands company fimnances is checking the investmentrs.

robatwork

itwasntme001 said:

Makes you wonder in 10 years when we will all be investing in Woodford because value may very well be the fashion by then.

The fact that 2 of the most respected names that I was invested with in the financial industry (I speak as a layman) in Equitable Life and Neil Woodford both went tits up, makes it very hard to a) take a reputation or S&P rating seriously and b) know where the next bubble is.

itwasntme001

robatwork said:

itwasntme001 said:

Makes you wonder in 10 years when we will all be investing in Woodford because value may very well be the fashion by then.

The fact that 2 of the most respected names that I was invested with in the financial industry (I speak as a layman) in Equitable Life and Neil Woodford both went tits up, makes it very hard to a) take a reputation or S&P rating seriously and b) know where the next bubble is.

The fundamental issues are that certain styles/strategies do well in certain environments so in order to justify active funds, you HAVE to outperform the market which means you HAVE to choose the style that works for the current climate.  Together with the fact that investing is just about the most competitive strategy game there is and that no one can consistently forecast the economy, you won't get many long term star equity fund managers (in fact I can't think of any in the UK).

So you have a situation where nearly all the active funds held by retail investors have not really been around for that long - perhaps over just 1 or 2 economic regimes so it is far too early to tell whether these were genuine long term performers or just got luckily with their style persisting.

The problem is you will only be able to find out if it is the former with hindsight, and by then you would have missed the good gains (you can't buy previous performance) and the star fund manager would have aged and be closer to retirement so the fund wouldn't be a long term holding anyway.

So the only thing sensible to invest in for equities for the long term is a passive index tracker fund.

I think also reflexivity has a massive impact on markets and we maybe seeing a lot of that in the out performers.

[Deleted User]

Linton said:

Deleted_User said:

A pure growth play like this isn’t something I would buy but for someone who would... Why buy this fund rather than a few key shares from this fund? 

Because in a year's time the fund may be invested differently.  Would you be?  With the fund you can be pretty confident that someone who understands company fimnances is checking the investmentrs.

They have a small number of stocks dominating the fund and its not like the approach of buying large US tech is particularly complicated.  And you can see what they buy and sell. How did this fund manager weather the Tech bust in the late 90s? What was he running at that time? Do you know when he is planning to retire or move jobs? 

Prism

I think one of the problems of replicating a fund like this would be that personal opinion would come into it. For example if I was to try this I wouldn't be able to bring myself to invest in Zoom since I see no real future for it. I don't really understand what Wayfair do, so that would be out too. Before long I would have something that only partly looks like the fund. Oh, and I would quite possibly be wrong about my decisions.

[Deleted User]

Prism said:

I think one of the problems of replicating a fund like this would be that personal opinion would come into it. For example if I was to try this I wouldn't be able to bring myself to invest in Zoom since I see no real future for it. I don't really understand what Wayfair do, so that would be out too. Before long I would have something that only partly looks like the fund. Oh, and I would quite possibly be wrong about my decisions.

Just pick the top 5. They are all highly correlated momentum tech stocks.  Your result will be similar. No cost either.  Monitor the holdings - if you think the fund manager is clairvoyant.

Prism

Deleted_User said:

Prism said:

I think one of the problems of replicating a fund like this would be that personal opinion would come into it. For example if I was to try this I wouldn't be able to bring myself to invest in Zoom since I see no real future for it. I don't really understand what Wayfair do, so that would be out too. Before long I would have something that only partly looks like the fund. Oh, and I would quite possibly be wrong about my decisions.

Just pick the top 5. They are all highly correlated momentum tech stocks.  Your result will be similar. No cost either.  Monitor the holdings - if you think the fund manager is clairvoyant.

It would be similar if the main work was done by the top five. It seems though that more often than not its a few of the lower allocation holdings that do really well and push into the top five. They also sell whole holdings pretty quickly if the situation changes so a top 5 holding from last year Grubhub completely disappeared at some point this year. They don't announce that though until several months later. 

I think I will just stick to paying the fund managers to work this stuff out - at least this one is only 0.5%.