Craig Baker of Willis Towers Watson reveals Alliance Trust’s top 12 stocks and how many are held by its nine external fund managers.

This is the fourth and last excerpt from our virtual event with Alliance Trust (ATST ) last week. If these have whetted your appetite, you can watch the whole ‘Big Broadcast’ here.

Can’t watch now? Read the transcript

Craig Baker:

This is the 12 stocks that have got the biggest relative position versus the index weight. So, if you take Alphabet, it says where it’s located in the United States which sector it’s in. How many of our stock pickers. So, remember there are nine stock pickers. How many of them are owning it at this particular point in time and how overweight or underweight a stock is relative to the benchmark. You’ll see there, five of our stock pickers own Alphabet at the moment. Five actually own Visa. You’ll see four own Amazon, three own HDFC Bank and Mastercard. Then most of the others are owned by one manager only. Certainly, outside of the top 12, once you go through the rest of the portfolio, virtually every stock is only owned by one stock picker. There are definitely a few stocks that can be owned by a number of them. That’s fine.

Gavin Lumsden:

What does that say about the attractions of Alphabet or the others?

Craig Baker:

I think it means it’s a pretty exciting idea. If you’ve got people that look at the world very, very differently and all of these managers look at the world very differently and you’ve got some value managers and some growth managers, both finding Alphabet attractive, coming at the problem from a different perspective. That really means that we’re very comfortable being overweight a stock where that’s the case.