Over the year to 30 April 2014, the Polar Capital Technology Trust (PCT), one of our Top 100 Funds for 2013, underperformed the Dow Jones World Technology Index by 1.9 per cent, delivering NAV growth of 11.2 per cent compared to 13.1 per cent from the benchmark.
The manager, Ben Rogoff, says the fund outperformed for most of the year, but lost all its outperformance in the final six weeks because of a swing away from new, growth technology stocks such as Tesla (TSLA) and Twitter (TWTR), in favour of "old-guard" value technology stocks such as Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel Corp (INTC).
The fund also lost out because it held 4.7 per cent (at 30 May 2014) of its assets in cash, and it had a significant 5.3 per cent allocation to Japan.