I can’t see it in my Android app yet, but maybe that’s due to the amount being 0. Will check again tomorrow.
Feels like stoneage in times like these (crypto, stock and ETF trading withing seconds from my phone), but I guess that’s the beauty of mutual funds. You are not tempted to sell them so fast.
On the contrary, I think this is the perfect strategy to filter the right kind of investors. If you believe in their philosophy that you are buying businesses over a 5+ years horizon, and that the main source of your increase in wealth will come from businesses becoming more profitable (i.e compounding earnings) rather than from changing market sentiments (i.e P/E going up and down), then you don’t need to provide liquidity to your investors more than once a day.
All in all, listed companies are both a benediction and a curse:
Technically, couldn’t we have a stock exchange that only runs auctions couple of times a day?
I definitely wouldn’t mind for ETFs 
I agree with all you said. Investment should be for the longterm. Fruits are also not growing in a few days in reality.
True. That’s how Warren Buffett has earned a lot of money over the years, by investing in good businesses.
I know, what I mean is having only a few auctions a day, no other trades happening. IIRC Matt Levine talked about that (probably in the context of the changes that IEX does in the area).
Edit: seems like Taiwan used to not have a continuous trading, but had periodic auctions Authorization denied
I guess it would be similar to that model, just with a lot less auction, it’s not like we need price discovery when the basket is known (most index ETFs).
I‘m tempted to drop my ARKK for some value/growth tilt, what is the consensus that SSON or the Fundsmith T should perform better?
I suggest reading some of their shareholder letters and take a detailed look at their website and then decide for yourself on whether you think these funds will outperform the market in the long run.
The main principle is the same as Berkshire Hathaway, “buy good companies”.
I wouldn’t say perform better but for sure less volatility than ARKK. If you watch the price chart of these 3 since 2018 you will see all pretty much at the same place in terms of price increase in %. Note the stable increase of the Fundsmith T class and SSON compared to the wild ride and decent of ARKK.
On top of what @Burningstone recommends I would recommend you to watch the latest general assembly meeting videos of Fundsmith, get to know Terry Smith, he’s even fun to watch. The AGM for this year should be around March but you can watch the previous ones also.
This Smithson Mutual Fund, does it have any idiosyncrasies compared to “normal” stock and etf’s re the Swiss Tax declaration?
Or would i simply declare the wortth at EOY and a UK dividend (UK, so no WHT to reclaim) and that’s it?
Trying not to add complexity as only considering a small position at this time.
Thanks.
Terry Smith and his team base their decisions upon those 6 KPIs, plus cash flow yield (cash flow / market cap). So it is very in contrast to ARKK where the majority of the companies aren’t profitable yet:
Then they also argue that they only invest in companies that offer a competitive advantage although I don’t think that this is always true. They also sometimes completely ignore the PE ratio, e.g. they bought Rational at a PE around 70 into SSON
Just for reference: the shares appeared yesterday after 1pm CET. I can also see them in IBKR android app now.
Not sure if there is any consensus here, but I think you are comparing apples to oranges. ARKK is the meme stock of the ETF world, from my humble point of view. Some of the top holdings are Tesla, Coinbase and Zoom. Those 3 alone account for almost 15% of the holdings. If there’s a downturn in the stock market, I personally think that those three holdings will get hammered badly. But who am I? 
If I understand Fundsmith and SSON correctly, they invest in good companies (someone mentioned Berkeshire already). I think that investing in good companies is fundamentally different from “buy the latest hot sh*t” paradigm used by Cathie Wood and her ARKK fund.
They do NOT apply a value strategy.
I second the recommendations above, before investing anything start with the FS 2021 letter to shareholders to make sure you understand their strategy and their comments on value investing. In particular the possibility that the funds are likely to underperform in the short term if there is a rotation to value.
Then regards which to buy, it depends but personally I am aiming to get to 67% FS, 33% SSON
FS contains large cap stocks and has a track record over 11 years to Dec 31 returning ~16% pa in CHF. Their strategy makes logical sense to me in terms of being likely to beat the market long term. The fund manger was successful managing a pension fund before starting FS and I remember reading he had returned ~12% pa in CHF over his investment career spanning 2008 crash. In summary I trust it a lot.
Smithson applies the same theory to small/mid caps which have historically given higher returns over the long term but with more volatility. Return over 3 years ~20% pa in CHF. Whilst I believe the strategy I am cautious about it due to the short track record
By way of illustration on volatility, FS is currently down -12% since Dec 31 and SSON -20%. Similar pattern occurred in March 2020. Because I am still accumulating I set limit orders to top up my SSON to take advantage of this
The chart below was shared in Smithson IPO document. The data is for 5 years to June 2018 during a bull market and before SSON launch so I would take it with a pinch of salt
Why would you drop it now (I assume in massive loss)?
If you believe Cathie, stock up rather than drop and forget them until 2026-27.
Your fresh new capital can go into FS as planned, but I wouldn’t realize losses just because the market turned sour (if you believed in Cathie in the first place).
@user137 good point, might follow that strategy.
IBKR doesn’t show me a price for FUNDSMITH EQUITY “T” (GBP) ACC, where would I find it? Nevermind, read their homepage and found the price. Wierdly enough the order in IBKR had to be placed in amount of money and not amount of “units” you’d like from it. /shrug
yeah, the interface is not very userfriendly, but again, this is IB 
It’s not IB. It’s a mutual fund.
Remember, they trade once a day.
You’re ordering
Instead of
You get what you pay.
The reckoning may finally be here for Fundsmith, where the fund underperforms the markets, with two of their top 10 holdings each plunging more than 25% within a single day - on consecutive days:
Facebook (now Meta Platforms): -26% today.
PayPal: -25% yesterday.
Perhaps less surprisingly, these are both technology/internet stocks. While I do own some of their top 10 stocks individually, I never gave a thought about buying Facebook. Fundsmith initiated their position in February 2018. It’s still up about 33% as I’m typing this but that pales compared to other “consumer tech” stocks (think Google, Apple). It even did before today.
Now, hindsight is, of course, 20/20. Facebook, I believe though, failed several of their own criteria:
The truth is, social networks are quite a fashionable business. Despite its global reach and user base (difficult to replicate), user interaction on Facebook must have been declining or have had low growth for at least some years. The truth is I don’t know anybody below the age of 45 who has used Facebook regularly the last couple of years. Instagram doesn’t seem a platform that can’t be easily replicated, and certainly not resilient to technological innovation. And the company can’t just snap up every up-and-coming competitor (as they did with buying WhatsApp and Instagram) when they’re controlled by a company from China (Tiktok). It was therefore the top 10 stock of theirs that I’d been least comfortable with.
I think I remember Terry Smith conceding at times that they were somewhat hesitant about investing in technology stocks, as they were somewhat out of their core area of expertise or familiarity. And this may have been one of the cases where the business’s financials may have looked nice on paper - but the writing was kind of one the wall, if you’re familiar and in touch with the user base.
Somewhat ironically, Fundsmith’s activity on their own Facebook page seems to have markedly declined after 2018, with currently no new posts after July 2020.
Will be interesting to hear their thoughts on these 2 stocks in the AGM in Feb
I am trying to keep things in perspective though: If (big if) they decide have made a misstep regards long term growth and ROCE assumptions for these 2 stocks and they decide to sell up, I guess they comprise ~10% of the fund. So we are talking a 2-3% negative impact that will be partially offset by positive surprise on other tech stocks Amazon and Google. That is significant in one year but not relative to the long term outperformance of the fund.
In addition if we talk about performance vs. market remember that MSCI world includes Tech stocks too. What FS does is try to bet on the horses with better Quality metrics - but I guess they may not always get it right
