Gresham House Strategic
Capitalising on dislocations to build for the future
8 October 2020
Gresham House Strategic (GHS) has been active over the COVID-19 pandemic, taking advantage of a high cash balance following the profitable disposal of IMImobile (23.7% IRR) in early 2020 to invest in attractive businesses at depressed levels. GHS describes itself as a ‘strategic public equity’ fund, meaning it takes a private equity-style approach to investing mainly in listed companies, buying significant stakes and engaging proactively to create and unlock value through operational, strategic and management initiatives. Given the favourable entry prices of many recent investments, GHS’s managers are targeting returns of as much as 2.5–3.0x over the typical three- to five-year holding period. Furthermore, reflecting confidence in the outlook for the portfolio, its underlying income (including the potential for reintroduction of dividends by some holdings) and scope for portfolio realisations, GHS’s board has recently raised its dividend growth target for FY21 from 15% to 20%. MORE »
Strategic public equity investing
24 February 2020
Gresham House Strategic (GHS) describes itself as a ‘strategic public equity’ fund, meaning it takes a private equity-style approach to investing mainly in listed companies, buying significant stakes and engaging proactively with holdings to create and unlock value through operational, strategic and management initiatives. It currently has 18 holdings (15 equities and three convertible loan notes) spread across a range of industries, but all based in the UK. Performance has been strong in the past year (NAV TR +22.6% and share price TR +52.5% over 12 months to 31 January 2020), with a large contribution from top holding Augean (share price +224% in 2019). The management team at Gresham House argues that this validates the strategy, and the narrowing in the discount over the past 12 months (from c 25% to 2.3% in late 2019) suggests the market is beginning to appreciate what GHS offers. MORE »
