Mark Sheppard has topped up his holding in his £271m Manchester & London Investment trust (MNL), as shares continue to trade at a discount.
Shepperd invested a further £220,000 into the trust, in which he is a majority shareholder. It is currently trading at a 5% discount to net asset value, at a price of 629p per share and has a market capitalisation of £257m.
It means he now holds roughly 53% of the trust’s shares through his M&M Investment Company, worth a total value of £136m.
The independent rival to Baillie Gifford’s Scottish Mortgage (SMT) is heavily invested in high-growth tech companies, holding three top US tech stocks within its top five holdings, including Amazon (17%), Microsoft (16%), Alphabet (15%).
The trust is also a big backer of Asian growth companies, with Alibaba (12%) and Tencent (12%) making up the rest of the top-five holdings in the trust, and all of its 24% allocation to Chinese equities.
But with no exposure to stellar stock Tesla and unquoted holdings like Ant Financial, which are part of the Baillie Gifford portfolio, MNL did comparatively poorly over 2020, returning 18% compared with SMT’s 110%.
Despite this, the trust managed to remain relatively unscathed during the pandemic panic in March last year, limiting share price falls to 19% in the meltdown.
Performance over the longer term has also been good. Over five years it has returned 215%, compared with the Investment Trust Global Index of 130%.
