Smithson (SSON) was launched in 2018 raising a mammoth £823m at 1,000p per share. Managed by Simon Barnard and Will Morgan of Fundsmith, it follows a similar style to Fundsmith Equity in holding a concentrated portfolio of quality stocks but focuses on global small-cap stocks that are typically valued up to £15bn. Its shares had doubled by the end of 2021 and the share count ballooned from 82m to 177m with the shares nearly always trading at a premium to NAV. But performance was weak in the difficult markets of 2022 and a double-digit discount has persisted for over two years. Smithson began b...
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In this week’s edition of the Weekly Investment Trust Podcast, Jonathan Davis, editor of the Investment Trusts Handbook, talks to Simon Barnard, manager of the Smithson Investment Trust (SSON), and Ewan Lovett-Turner, head of investment trust research at Numis Securities. We are grateful for the support of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which enables us to keep the podcast free.
You can listen to this week’s podcast in full on the audio players below. Alternatively, you can subscribe and download it on most podcast channels including Soundcloud, Apple, Spotify, Google, and others. For any listeners who have subscribed via Stitcher, please note that service has announced it will be discontinued. Please resubscribe through one of the other channels.
If you enjoy the weekly podcast, you may also find value in joining The Money Makers Circle. This is a membership scheme that offers subscribers an opportunity to receive additional premium content, including interviews, investment trust performance data, market/portfolio reviews and regular extracts from the editor’s notebook. As well as the regular features, this week sees the introduction of a new Readers’ Questions feature, where Jonathan will answer a topical question submitted by a subscriber. There is no fund profile this week while the author, Stuart Watson, takes a break, but next week’s profile will be of BlackRock Frontiers Investment Trust (BRFI). Jonathan has also published the first of his video reviews looking at sector performance, this time looking at defensive trusts, with a second video due soon. A subscription costs £8 a month, or a modest £2 a week.

0:00:44 – This week’s guest
0:01:25 – Review of the week
0:04:20 – Corporate news and announcements
0:09:06 – Money Makers Circle
0:10:02 – Summary of results
0:16:10 – Q&A with Simon Barnard
0:35:23 – Q&A with Ewan Lovett-Turner
1:00:04 – Close
Trusts mentioned in this week’s podcast (with tickers) include:
About Money Makers
We are an independent research and publishing venture committed to providing high-quality investment information and resources. You can sign up below to be notified about the latest podcasts by email as soon as they become available. Please note that the podcasts should not be regarded as personal financial advice, but are provided for information and background only. We are very grateful for your continued support and the enthusiastic response to our 170 podcasts in the more than three years since launch.
Disclosures about the editor’s personal holdings of investment trusts can be found here. Our podcasts are also available on the Association of Investment Companies website (www.theaic.co.uk) and Doceo (doceo.tv). The producer of the podcasts is the brilliant Ben Gamblin – more details on him here.
Jonathan Davis, editor of the Investment Trusts Handbook, is joined in this week’s edition of the Money Makers Weekly Investment Trust podcast by Simon Barnard, manager of the Smithson Investment Trust (SSON).
You can listen to this week’s podcast in full on the audio players below. Alternatively, you can subscribe and download it on most podcast channels including Soundcloud, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher and others.
If you enjoy the weekly podcast, you may also find value in joining The Money Makers Circle. This is a membership scheme that offers subscribers an opportunity to receive additional premium content, including interviews, investment trust performance data, market/portfolio reviews and regular extracts from the editor’s notebook. This week, as well as the regular features, the Circle features a profile of the Baillie Gifford Japan Trust (BGFD). A subscription costs £8 a month, or a modest £2 a week.
00:28 – This week’s guest
01:06 – Who’s coming on in future weeks
01:23 – Money Makers Circle
02:03 – Review of the week
02:45 – Corporate news
07:57 – Results summary
10:24 – Q&A with Simon Barnard
41:21 – Close
Trusts mentioned in this week’s podcast (with tickers) include:
About Money Makers
We are an independent research and publishing venture committed to providing high-quality investment information and resources. You can sign up below to be notified about the latest podcasts by email as soon as they become available. Please note that the podcasts should not be regarded as personal financial advice, but are provided for information and background only. We are very grateful for your continued support and the enthusiastic response to our over 140 podcasts in the more than two and a half years since launch.
Disclosures about the editor’s personal holdings of investment trusts can be found here. Our podcasts are also available on the Association of Investment Companies website (www.theaic.co.uk) and Doceo (doceo.tv). The producer of the podcasts is the brilliant Ben Gamblin – more details on him here.
Our latest Q and A for premium subscribers is with Simon Barnard, co-founder and lead manager of the Smithson investment trust, which has been in the Investment Trusts Handbook model investment trust portfolio since the trust launched in October 2018 and has performed very strongly since then. Here is a link to the last Q and A we did with Simon in December 2020. You can also read Stuart Watson's profile from March last year by following this link.
When we spoke just over a year ago, Smithson was coming off its second successive year of strong growth, having more than doubled in size to a £2 ...
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Stuart qualified as a chartered accountant before moving into journalism and has 20 years of experience of owning and writing about investment trusts from an independent standpoint. He is now producing regular fund profiles for the Money Makers circle. This post originally appeared on his blog but it has been added to our archive to build up our library of content.
One of the questions that often gets asked about Smithson, Fundsmith's global smaller company investment trust, is whether it is in danger of growing too large. It's a question that's been bugging me for a while but after digging i...
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For premium subscribers we periodically do podcast interviews with fund managers and analysts about current market conditions and funds (occasionally shares) that we invest in. This one is with Simon Barnard, co-founder and co-manager of the Smithson investment trust which has been in the Money Makers model investment trust portfolio since its launch in 2018 and has performed strongly since then. The transcript is a lightly edited version of the original 40-minute podcast recording.
Welcome Simon. How has the two year experience that you’ve had as a listed investment trust, in terms of the ...
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