RIT Capital Partners (RCP)

RIT Capital Partners (RCP) is staging a visible return to form. From its listing in 1988 the trust, led by the late Lord Jacob Rothschild, became known as one of London's great compounders, capturing the bulk of equity market upside while participating in a fraction of the downside, and its shares customarily traded around NAV. That standing frayed in the post-2021 period as scepticism over private valuations pushed the shares to a discount. Under Maggie Fanari, appointed CEO in March 2024, the evidence points to a resurgence, with all three pillars of the trust's highly differentiated portfolio having delivered good returns, powering attractive, equity-like NAV performance and share price returns ahead even of the MSCI ACWI (see Performance).

One of the key attractions of RCP is the access it offers to private investments which are unavailable to most investors, including institutional investors. RCP holds stakes in some of the world's largest and most sought-after private companies, including SpaceX (now listed), Anthropic (planning an IPO this year), Databricks and Stripe. Crucial is the repeatable process behind them: a flywheel in which long-standing relationships with elite managers and founders generate fund positions and open doors to co-investment and secondary opportunities. SpaceX illustrates the point. Bought well below the IPO price, the position has delivered 4x. The recent allocation to Y Combinator feeds the top of the same funnel. This accelerator has backed thousands of startups since 2005, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase and Stripe.

Private investments have delivered the best returns over 2025 and 2026, while RCP has realised 43% of its private portfolio at above carrying value during a weak market for exits, which we think should allay some fears about valuations. Quoted equities, a mix of directly held positions and specialist, largely closed, funds have also delivered good returns while the uncorrelated strategies have helped the portfolio outperform in the two most recent drawdowns – the tariff tantrum of 2025 and Iran war sell-off of 2026.

RCP still trades on a 20% discount at the time of writing, although this has narrowed considerably following a tender offer (see Discount).