‘We’re pretty excited by the outlook for a lot of reasons and literally at the moment we’re in sell to buy mode,’ says Georgina Brittain, manager of JP Morgan UK Smaller Companies trust.
‘We have such a list of things that we’d like to own, but we don’t want to sell anything and we don’t have any cash.
‘That is such an exciting place for a fund manager to be. You’re trying to find the thing that you’re most happy to sell but you don’t really want to. But you’ve got such other great opportunities.’
On this episode of the Investing Show, the UK smaller and medium-sized companies specialist joins Simon Lambert and Richard Hunter to discuss the broad range of opportunities that she and her team are finding as the coronavirus recovery gathers pace.
Georgina talks about three of the major holdings in the trust’s portfolio, highlighting the diversity of great British small companies on offer to investors: publisher future, homeware and furnishing star Dunelm, and life-sciences and healthcare specialist SDI, which she describes as an acorn that has a buy and build growth strategy that could really pay off.
The fund manager with more than two decades’ experience also discussed how she and her team handled the coronavirus crash and the rebound since.
She says: ‘I have managed money for almost 25 years. You think you’ve seen it all. You know that at times it’s stressful or very stressful. Last year was off the clock, is the only way to describe it in terms of the stress.’
Finally, with investment big hitters, such as Scottish Mortgage, saying they need to look further afield for exciting young companies and increasingly delve into the unlisted space, does Georgina still see great opportunities coming through?
She says that while you need to be incredibly careful, backing IPOs as a small cap investor can pay off – and that the UK market has plenty of those coming through.
THE INVESTING SHOW
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