Mid Wynd Trust - Full Year Results

Mid Wynd International is a theme-based global investment trust. The strategy is to hold around 55 - 70 holdings between 8 to 10 themes. Current themes include Automation/Robots 13%, Emerging Market Consumer 10%, Tourism 0%, Healthcare & Immunology 11%, Online Services 26%, Low Carbon World 7%, Screen Time 9% and Scientific Equipment 10%.

The management team led by Simon Edelsten have built a portfolio of high-quality holdings which focus on a number of trends which offer the prospect of long term growth.

The shares were added to my portfolio in April 2018 at the price of 474p.

Results

Mid Wynd have today announced results for the full year to end June 2020 (link via Investegate). This has been another good year with share price total return up 9.1% compared to the All Country World Index 5.2%. By comparison the FTSE All Share Index fell by -16.7% over the year to end June.

The largest contribution to the outperformance have been from holdings in Amazon, Microsoft and Barrick Gold. Over the past 5 years, net assets have increased by 117%.

3 Yr Performance v FTSE All Share Index
(click to enlarge)

I acquired this trust mainly for growth but it does offer a yield of around 1.0%. The total dividend for the full year will be increased by 5% to 6.12p (2019 5.83p) which is covered by revenues of 7.38p

The trust includes climate/low carbon as one of their themes and I was disappointed to see that they have reduced the weighting over the year ...including Orsted. The managers are clearly climate-aware and avoid coal, fossil fuel stocks and the mining sector which together account for 12% of the global index.

One of their themes was tourism which is not so climate-friendly and I was pleased to see the managers have decided to drop this theme and reduced exposure from 5% to 0% over the past 12 months.  

Here's an extract on sustainable investing from their report :

"Over recent years a number of investment houses have made much of the sustainability of their investments or how their funds score on measures of environmental, social and governance factors. As we aim for longer term investment success, we have always included these factors in our selection process. Our interpretation of the factors is based on common sense and real-life situations, rather than any tick list or one-size-fits-all screen. As an example, we think that air travel may remain essential in large Asian countries while the environmental damage of cheap flights may become unacceptable in Europe.

We are not, however, looking to change the world, nor do we presume to have an ethical code that all would follow. Our aim is to invest in companies which prosper without damaging society or the environment something that is likely to make profitability more sustainable. We believe that this is an aim that we share with our investors and that this perspective is, and has always been, central to the management of a successful Investment Trust".

The share price is currently 645p so a rise of 36% since purchase plus dividends

Steady progress I think. I would like to see the low carbon theme back above 10% and have passed on some thoughts to the managers on this but I have my own green portfolio to offset some of the perceived shortcomings in my funds. For now, this can return to the bottom drawer.

As ever, this article is merely a record of my personal investment decisions and should not be regarded as an endorsement or recommendation - always DYOR!