General Discussion

I doubt many other private investors have ICGT as their largest holding but I started investing in it in the 1990s and it became my favourite stock after the Chairman in the 2008 Annual Report basically said "Sell this share" as he felt the market was overheated. I took his advice and was able some 18 months later to buy the shares back at something like half the price and at a 40% discount to NAV. Since then, it has performed really well - NAV up 213% over 10 years, share price up 246% - but despite this it often trades at a discount of over 20%. Accordingly, whenever I have some spare funds to invest, I often find it hard to resist adding to my ICGT holding as it seems to be such great value. Last week it reported yet another set of cracking results - NAV now 1523p per share up 9.3% in the quarter making it up 37.5% on the year. What happens? The shares go down to 1138, making the discount now over 25%. Barking! I know that ITN, in its latest note on ICGT, was a bit luke-warm, saying that its policy of having 50% in funds and 50% in direct investments made it neither one or the other so that investors should go for something like Pantheon International (PIN) if they wanted the greater comfort of a fund based Private Equity vehicle. However, for me, the Private Equity sector is the outstanding value sector of the moment and so I have large holdings also in PIN, HVPE, BPET, OCI, DNE, HGT, SLPE, and NBPE not to mention CLDN, which has similarities. All have been excellent performers.