Allianz Technology (ATT ) is the best-performing London-listed public equity fund over 10 years but trails its benchmark index. Why is that? Fund manager Mike Seidenberg explains to Citywire’s Gavin Lumsden.

This is the first excerpt from our virtual event with Allianz Technology this month. You can also watch the whole, one-hour ‘Big Broadcast’ here.

Can’t watch now? Read the transcript

Gavin Lumsden:

Allianz Technology is currently the best-performing London-listed public equity fund over 10 years as far as I can see. It’s got 607% total shareholder return as of yesterday, which is a great return obviously, yet it underperforms its Dow Jones World Technology index. What does that say about the trust and its benchmark?

Mike Seidenberg:

I think a couple of things. We have underperformed it as of late. We typically haven’t underperformed it over the long-term, over the duration. I think that the important thing here is we’ve had a headwind of the Magnificent Seven. They’ve been really, really strong stocks. If I think about it from a portfolio perspective and just a risk perspective, if I were to have benchmark weights in those names, relative to our benchmark, I don’t know how well I’d sleep at night knowing who the buyer of this trust is. What we try to do is to make sure that we have representation from a risk perspective. Yet also, we’re not benchmark-driven. We’re benchmark-aware.

We’re finding great opportunities and we’ve tried to keep up. The other thing I would tell you – and we were modestly disappointed last year relative to the benchmark, but still had fairly healthy absolute returns – I feel that as time goes on, as tech leadership broadens, we’ll probably see other sectors make up for the dominance that we’ve seen of the Magnificent Seven.