Investment Portfolio

Photo: NVIDIA

Top Twenty Holdings

1

1 NVIDIA

Sector: Semiconductors &
Semiconductor Equipment
Country: United States
Value of holding: £179,627,000
% of portfolio: 10.5

Nvidia designs graphics processing units (GPUs). It built its name in the gaming industry, but its real strength is now in artificial intelligence. Generative AI requires vast processing power that is now largely provided by Nvidia’s sophisticated GPUs. The group has built a significant head-start in this part of the market, which has led to strong earnings growth. Its GPUs are also used in a variety of other industries, including architecture, engineering and scientific research.

Photo: Apple

Top Twenty Holdings

2

2 Apple

Sector: Technology Hardware, Storage
& Peripherals
Country: United States
Value of holding: £157,276,000
% of portfolio: 9.2

Apple kept its crown as the most valuable company in the world in 2024, with a market capitalisation at the end of the year of $3.8 trillion. Earnings and profits have continued to tick higher in 2024, with iPhone sales stronger than expected. Its higher margin services business, which includes its iCloud and Apple Music segments, continued to see double digit growth.

Photo: Microsoft

Top Twenty Holdings

3

3 Microsoft

Sector: Software
Country: United States
Value of holding: £134,622,000
% of portfolio: 7.8

Microsoft has emerged as one of the dominant forces in artificial intelligence. It has had a tie-up with Chat GPT group Open AI since 2019, and has developed an AI-based service Copilot. In 2024, it announced a $3.3bn investment in an AI hub in Wisconsin, and a $30bn AI investment partnership with BlackRock. Its cloud computing business has also gone from strength to strength. Its deal to buy gaming group Activision Blizzard finally completed in 2023, having also bought fibre optic cable maker Lumenisity in late 2022.

Photo: Shutterstock / Primakov

Top Twenty Holdings

4

4 Meta Platforms

Sector: Interactive Media & Services
Country: United States
Value of holding: £129,855,000
% of portfolio: 7.6

Having rebranded Facebook as Meta Platforms in 2021, signalling its ambitions in the metaverse, more recently the group has been using its deep pockets to develop its AI proposition. Meta announced its artificial intelligence model Llama 2 in July 2023 and in 2024, announced its new AI model Movie Gen, which can generate movie clips from user prompts. The group also owns powerful brands, such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Photo: Broadcom

Top Twenty Holdings

5

5 Broadcom

Sector: Semiconductors &
Semiconductor Equipment
Country: United States
Value of holding: £95,680,000
% of portfolio: 5.6

Broadcom designs and develops of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Its chips are used in a wide variety of markets, including data centres, networking, software, broadband, wireless, and storage and industrial markets. Its $61 billion takeover bid for cloud-computing company VMware, finally completed in November 2023. The company’s market capitalisation tipped over $1 trillion in December 2024.

Photo: Shutterstock / BongkarnGraphic

Top Twenty Holdings

6

6 Alphabet

Sector: Interactive Media & Services
Country: United States
Value of holding: £85,854,000
% of portfolio: 5.0

Best-known as the parent company of Google, the world’s leading search engine, Alphabet also owns YouTube, AI research lab Deep Mind, travel app Waze, ad management group DoubleClick, smart home devices group Nest and fitness tracker group Fitbit. The group is also a major provider of cloud services, though remains behind Amazon and Microsoft. It is making significant investments in AI that should help its search engine and YouTube business segments. In 2024, it unveiled its first quantum computing chip, Willow.

Photo: Shutterstock / Tada Images

Top Twenty Holdings

7

7 Amazon.com

Sector: Broadline Retail
Country: United States
Value of holding: £58,283,000
% of portfolio: 3.4

Amazon.com has created a retail revolution since its launch in Jeff Bezos’s garage in 1994, but has also seen significant growth in its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services. This gives it a foothold in the nascent AI market, likely to be important in the years ahead. It also owns brands such as Ring, Twitch, IMDb, and Whole Foods Market. It remains the leading ecommerce site across the globe.

Photo: TSMC

Top Twenty Holdings

8

8 Taiwan Semiconductor

Sector: Semiconductors &
Semiconductor Equipment
Country: Taiwan
Value of holding: £57,723,000
% of portfolio: 3.4

TSMC has been a dedicated semiconductor foundry since 1987 and is now the world’s most valuable semiconductor company. Clients include Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm and Nvidia, while Intel and Texas Instruments, among others, outsource some of their production to TSMC. Until recently, TSMC only made its most advanced chips in Taiwan, but it is currently building foundries in Japan, the US and Germany.

Photo: ServiceNow

Top Twenty Holdings

9

9 ServiceNow

Sector: Software
Country: United States
Value of holding: £55,297,000
% of portfolio: 3.2

Founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, ServiceNow has a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows. It announced a tie-up with Nvidia in May 2023 to bring AI services to major corporations. ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service, offering the infrastructure for enterprise and technical management support systems, such as IT service management and help desks. In October 2024, the company announced a $1.5bn plan to invest in data centres into the UK.

Top Twenty Holdings

10

10 Palantir Technologies

Sector: Software
Country: United States
Value of holding: £44,063,000
% of portfolio: 2.6

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale and Alex Karp and is now a leader in big data and data analytics, with a range of products and services. It has participated in the boom for AI-related technologies and the shift in IT spending. It joined the S&P 500 in October 2024, which is likely to increase liquidity in the stock.

Top Twenty Holdings

11

11 CrowdStrike

Sector: Software
Country: United States
Value of holding: £40,344,000
% of portfolio: 2.4

Security group Crowdstrike uses artificial intelligence to give real-time protection and visibility for companies, preventing attacks. The group draws data from across the globe, giving it one of the most advanced data platforms for security. This is designed to identify and prevent breaches before they occur.

Top Twenty Holdings

12

12 Cyberark Software

Sector: Software
Country: Israel
Value of holding: £39,843,000
% of portfolio: 2.3

CyberArk is an Israeli-listed cybersecurity company, specialising in identity manage-ment and cloud security. Its products are used in areas such as financial services, energy, retail, healthcare and government markets. The company is headquartered in Israel, but has offices across the globe. Founder Udi Mokady was replaced as CEO by Matt Cohen in 2023. In 2024, the group acquired Venafi, a machine identity management company.

Top Twenty Holdings

13

13 Spotify Technology

Sector: Entertainment
Country: Luxembourg
Value of holding: £34,908,000
% of portfolio: 2.0

Streaming service Spotify was founded in 2006 by Swedish duo Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It dominates the streaming sector with around a third of the market. It currently has 252m paying subscribers. It continues to see strong revenue growth, but remains loss-making, with rising costs for content creation, marketing, and sales. Nevertheless, the music streaming market is still expanding.

Top Twenty Holdings

14

14 Cloudflare

Sector: IT Services
Country: United States
Value of holding: £33,958,000
% of portfolio: 2.0

Cloudflare was founded in 2009 and listed in 2019. It provides services to make websites run faster and more securely. Cloudflare is used by more than 26 million sites and by around 20% of the Internet for its web security services. In 2024, Cloudflare launched a tool that prevents bots from scraping websites.

Photo: Netflix

Top Twenty Holdings

15

15 Netflix

Sector: Entertainment
Country: United States
Value of holding: £32,485,000
% of portfolio: 1.9

Media group Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. It now reaches over half a billion people in more than 190 countries and 50 languages. The company continued to add subscribers in 2024 at a rate of around 5m per quarter, boosted by a crack-down on password sharing. It had hits in 2024 with The Perfect Couple, Nobody Wants This and Tokyo Swindlers.

Photo: Datadog

Top Twenty Holdings

16

16 Datadog

Sector: Software
Country: United States
Value of holding: £29,897,000
% of portfolio: 1.7

Datadog is a cloud software group, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through its data analytics platform. The group was founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, ultimately floating on the Nasdaq in 2019. The group has benefited from broader adoption of cloud computing and is now compatible with all the major web services providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others.

Photo: Trello/Atlassian

Top Twenty Holdings

17

17 Atlassian

Sector: Software
Country: United States
Value of holding: £27,907,000
% of portfolio: 1.6

Australian software group Atlassian Corporation was founded in 2002 by college friends Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. It specialises in collaboration tools for software development and project management. It now has 12,000 employees across 14 countries and serves over 300,000 customers in over 200 countries.

Top Twenty Holdings

18

18 Arista Networks

Sector: Communications Equipment
Country: United States
Value of holding: £27,800,000
% of portfolio: 1.6

Arista is a computer networking company founded in 2008 and listed since 2014. It builds scalable high-performance and ultra-low-latency networks for data centre and cloud computing environments. It currently has more than 10,000+ cloud customers worldwide and has deployed 100m ports. It was founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, Ken Duda and David Cheriton.

Photo: HubSpot

Top Twenty Holdings

19

19 HubSpot

Sector: Software
Country: United States
Value of holding: £27,772,000
% of portfolio: 1.6

HubSpot is a software group, specialising in marketing, sales, and customer service products. It was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. It has just bought FrameAI, an AI-powered conversation intelligence platform, which it plans to integrate into Breeze, the AI that powers its customer platform.

Top Twenty Holdings

20

20 SAP SE ADR

Sector: Software
Country: Germany
Value of holding: £26,471,000
% of portfolio: 1.5

SAP is a European multinational software company based in Germany. Its enterprise software helps companies manage business operations and customer relationships. It was founded in 1972 and now has offices in 180 countries and over 100,00 employees. It is the world's third-largest publicly traded software company by revenue, and the largest German company by market capitalisation.

Portfolio Analysis

at 31 December 2024

Geographical breakdown

As cash is excluded and the weightings for each country are rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent, the aggregate weights may not equal 100%.

Sector breakdown

As cash is excluded and the weightings for each sector are rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent, the aggregate weights may not equal 100%.

Investment Portfolio

at 31 December 2024