JPMorgan American (JAM)

JPMorgan American (JAM) offers core exposure to US equities through a Portfolio containing the best ideas from both growth and value managers. This diversification across investment factors has enabled the trust to adapt to rapidly shifting market environments over the past five years. In fact, the trust has been the best-performing constituent in the AIC North America sector over that period and has also managed to keep pace with the S&P 500 Index.

The managers remain constructive on AI, expressing this view through selective overweight positions in beneficiaries of AI-related capital expenditure, such as NVIDIA and Broadcom, rather than holding all technology mega-caps at benchmark weights, as they have become less positive on some of these names. While the portfolio is now underweight the information technology sector relative to its benchmark as a result of the bottom-up stock selection process, it still remains the largest sector allocation in absolute terms.

In fact, the trimming has extended to the industrials sector, where the managers have reduced their exposure to AI-exposed names. For example, they have trimmed their position in Quanta Services, a company providing infrastructure services for the electric power industry, among others, as the stock has rallied due to the surge in energy demand from data centres. Instead, they have reallocated to the ‘have-nots’, referring to companies unrelated to AI within the industrials sector. For example, they built a new position in 3M Company, which produces industrial and consumer goods, with the business starting to see organic growth.

There has also been a change in the Management team, with Eric Ghernati, who supported Felise Agranoff in stock selection on the growth side of the portfolio, has left the team having moved internally within JPMorgan. The value side of the portfolio continues to be overseen by Jack Caffrey and Graham Spence.