One of our best-read stories last week was about the latest poor annual results from Edinburgh Worldwide (EWI ), so it was interesting to see Ian Cowie tell Sunday Times readers he had put 1% of his ‘Forever Fund’ pension into the Baillie Gifford underperformer.

Writing his weekly Personal Account, Cowie, a former Investment Trust Insider columnist and Telegraph personal finance editor, said he had snapped up EWI shares at 152p on a 14% discount.

They closed on Friday at 145p with the discount reaching nearly 15% having, in Cowie’s words, achieved a ‘dismal hat-trick’ of being the worst performer in the AIC Global Smaller Companies over 10, five and one-year periods with total shareholder returns of 70.4%, -12.9% and -16.9%, respectively.

Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, Cowie explained he had the stars in his eyes, rather than the gutter of EWI’s woeful past performance. This poor showing was caused by the £654m portfolio’s slump in the growth selloff of the past two years as interest rates have surged, putting ‘Mr Market’ off its ‘jam tomorrow’ holdings.

Cowie’s motivation to buy the trust was the 9.1% weighting fund managers Douglas Brodie, Svetlana Viteva, Luke Ward have to Elon Musk’s unlisted rocket company SpaceX, which Cowie described as ‘one of the most exciting private companies on this planet’ with revenues nearly doubling to $4.6bn in 2022.

Cowie said his interest in SpaceX was less about Musk’s dreams of rockets soaring to Mars, and was more about its Starlink subsidiary which operates a constellation of satellites around the Earth, offering the prospect of faster broadband and internet access to all parts of the world.

The DIY investing columnist is impressed with Starlink’s growth prospects, writing: ‘Last month it claimed to have 2.3m active customers, an increase of 300,000 from three months earlier.’

The service costs a minimum of £75 a month with its hardware priced at about £450, said Cowie, who reported a hint from Musk that the company may launch a new, more portable dish this year.

Last June the US Department of Defense signed a contract for Starlink to continue supplying Ukraine with wi-fi believed to be worth $20m a month.

Cowie said he had in mind what professional investors like Baillie Gifford call ‘asymmetric returns’. ‘In plain English, the most EWI can lose on SpaceX and Starlink is 100% of its investment – but the potential upside is unlimited.

‘But beware that most “moonshot” stocks go up like a rocket and come down like a stick,’ he added, recalling that a tender offer for shares in SpaceX had valued the group at $150bn.  

EWI’s other interesting assets include drone-maker AeroVironment and UK online groceries delivery group Ocado (OCDO).

With his eyes on the trust’s fundamentals, Cowie did not refer to US hedge fund manager Saba Capital which has established an 11% stake that could be a prelude to an activist campaign to push the board into taking steps into narrowing the discount.

Saba has challenged the board of European Opportunities Trust (EOT ) this way but also successfully traded a big position in EWI stablemate Scottish Mortgage (SMT ) last year without commenting publicly.

Shares in EWI rose 1.9% to 147p this morning.