Temple Bar Investment Trust was launched in 1926 and made it on to the Official List of the LSE in 1952. While the trust retains its own management structure, the asset management function has been contracted out to Investec Asset Management, with Alastair Mundy taking over the reins in 2002.
Temple Bar is one of only two companies within UK Growth & Income to register a single figure fall in NAV over the past year. At just -4.6 per cent, the performance is extraordinary considering Temple Bar’s investment mandate, which requires the trust to invest primarily in FTSE 100 companies.
Alastair Mundy is a contrarian investor, but he is at pains to reject the notion that this represents an inflexible or dogmatic approach to stock selection. He says that the reluctance to simply fall in with the herd has underpinned Temple Bar’s significant outperformance: “Our contrarian principles has steered us away from the most popular sectors of the preceding years and, as these sectors fell furthest in 2008, our relative performance improved significantly.”
At the end of May, Temple Bar’s seven largest holdings constituted nearly half of the portfolio. Alastair Mundy maintains that they share two common attributes: a strong balance sheet and very diverse operations. The concentration of stocks with these charcteristics has been designed to offset levels of perceived risk, but the holdings have only been increased when the investment manager perceived that valuations had been unduly discounted on the back of adverse market news.
TEMPLE BAR (TMPL) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| PRICE | 603p | NAV | 602.72p |
| SIZE OF FUND | £414m | PRICE DISCOUNT TO NAV | 0.12% |
| No OF HOLDINGS: | 60 | 1 YEAR PERFORMANCE | -0.08%* |
| SET UP DATE | 30 Dec 26 | 3 YEAR PERFORMANCE | -21%* |
| MANAGER START DATE | 30 Dec 05 | 5 YEAR PERFORMANCE | 5.06%* |
| BETA | 0.84** | TOTAL EXPENSE RATIO | 0.44%** |
| VOLATILITY | 4 | YIELD | 5.46%* |
| TRACKING ERROR | na | GEARING | 118% |
| SHARPE RATIO | -0.25** | MORE DETAILS | templebarinvestments.co.uk |
Source: Temple Bar, *Thomson/Datastream & **Morningstar
Holdings as at 31 May 2009
Top ten holdings
| Holding | Percentage |
|---|---|
| BP | 8.7 |
| Royal Dutch Shell | 8.5 |
| HSBC Holdings | 7.9 |
| GlaxoSmithKline | 7.4 |
| Vodafone Group | 6.7 |
| Unilever | 5.8 |
| AstraZeneca | 4.8 |
| Signet Jewelers | 3.7 |
| British American Tobacco | 2.6 |
| Travis Perkins | 2.3 |
Sector breakdown
| Asset Allocation | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Oil & Gas | 17.2 |
| Haelthcare | 12.1 |
| Industrials | 10.8 |
| Financials | 10 |
| Consumer Goods | 9.8 |
| Fixed Interest | 9 |
| Telecommunications | 8.5 |
| Consumer Services | 8.2 |
| Cash | 7.3 |
| Basic Materials | 2.6 |
| Technology | 2.6 |
| Utilities | 1.9 |
