Sanlam Investments announces that the AUM of the Sanlam Global Artificial Intelligence Fund has reached £1bn, growing by 60% over the past 12 months. The fund’s objective is to identify leaders in, or beneficiaries of, the deployment of artificial intelligence globally.
The fund is run on a sub-investment basis by Chris Ford and Tim Day, both partners at Landseer Asset Management. The managers say that there are no capacity constraints with the approach they utilise and the strategy – which they first launched in 2017 – could comfortably grow many times from here.
As more companies worldwide harness AI technology, the opportunity set continues to broaden and deepen. Chris Ford and Tim Day strongly maintain that AI has the power to transform businesses across all regions and sectors, and believe that there are still myriad opportunities for investment.
To identify these, the managers are assisted by their custom-built AI screening tool, Orbit. Translating sources from multiple languages, it helps them uncover companies with meaningful AI engagement before the team carefully analyses the opportunities against their investment pillars.
Tim Day comments: “We are using AI to effectively triage our ideas, check the veracity of our hypotheses and automate our processes. We’ve had this tool for over seven years, and we know how to maximise its effectiveness. It’s incredibly powerful – and a real advantage for us.”
Chris Ford notes that the changes seen in artificial intelligence over the past seven years have been immense, and that things which the managers had asserted early on, had since taken place.
Chris Ford says: “Things that people called ‘pipe dreams’ when we launched the fund in 2017 are now happening. The changes have been utterly extraordinary. What was impossible is now possible.”
The managers cite advances in the speed and accuracy of radiography and medical imaging procedures as an example of the extraordinary progress that has taken place because of AI.
Chris Ford states: “The impact AI is having on the healthcare industry cannot be understated. Creating efficiencies in disease detection, image interpretation, and streamlining hospital workflows will have huge repercussions for patients and for cash-strapped providers such as the NHS.”
The fund has returned 29.4% over the past 12 months, annualising 19.7% over five years with an OCF of 0.5%.
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Past performance is not a guide to future performance.
Source: Sanlam as at 31/1/2024.
Tim Day comments: “We are not a pure tech fund, with just 52% invested in the sector, which makes the strong returns for the fund even more pleasing given the recent rally in technology. It shows that our diversified, global fund can perform without the risks of being overly concentrated in one area.”
Chris Ford continues: “Investing in companies using and deploying AI, as opposed to just focusing on those that provide the technology, means a much wider opportunity set. The enabling technologies, such as semiconductors, are cyclical in nature and therefore among the most volatile. By diversifying exposure to more stable growth in other incredibly interesting non-tech sectors such as healthcare and industrials we are helping to capture any future gains and mitigate downside shocks. Things that we believe can only be done by a truly global, sector-agnostic, actively managed fund”.
*AUM calculated for the fund as at 22/2/2023 was £637m. AUM calculated for the fund as at 22/2/2024 was £1,024m.
Fund risks
The Fund may invest in shares of companies listed on stock exchanges in the United Kingdom, and outside the United Kingdom, exchange rate fluctuations may cause the value of investments to go down as well as up. Investing in companies based in emerging markets may involve additional risks due to greater political, economic, regulatory risks, among other factors. The Fund may invest in derivatives for the purposes of efficient portfolio management and hedging.
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