SMT had more in Airbnb, I think, so the small stake that MNTN had may have been down to the fact it wasn’t created when the major fundraisings for this company took place.

BG do seem to have been fairly late to the party with Stripe, Bytedance and SpaceX though, investing in late 2018 and early 2019. But, as you say, it’s not easy to get on the guest list!

I’d definitely recommend the podcast with Peter Singlehurst that I linked to in the manager section. All BG’s managers seem to be well trained on the media front but it rounded out the thinking behind the trust nicely from my point of view.

Basically a lot of the portfolio looks decent, and it’s a pretty unique way for punters to access companies like these (and for cheaper fees than Endowments).

However I still think BG have questionable taste sometimes e.g. Allbirds – can’t really see that changing the world.

Also their whole pitch of saying they #neversell can be problematic e.g. Affirm – when things like this IPO at silly valuations, it seems to make sense to sell down & wait for a better entry point (if you still believe in it – I’m not sure about BNPL myself). As it is, they had 11% of it, and it’s down about 50% since IPO. So that’s not great.

Also frustratingly AirBnB, which seems pretty blue chip compared with Affirm, was a smaller position, wasn’t added to, & has shot up. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt & concede this may be easier to say with hindsight.

So anyway, I have some questions about the skill of the management team.

I’m sure I’m being unfair but, if you have access to the management, it’s not exactly rocket science buying shares in Stripe, Space X and Bytedance at this stage. It’s just that the rest of us can’t.

I want to believe that some nice, quite normal-seeming Brits can compete with the completely Alien VC Silicon-Valley types like Andreesen, and NY’s Tiger Global etc. But… I don’t, yet.

On balance, there seem more interesting companies than not, and so hopefully over the long run, this will do well.

I’ve heard you can purchase MNTN on HL, II and AJBell but you need to complete a Sophisticated Investor form before they will allow you to do so.

@BBB, that’s odd re: HL. Maybe it’s one of those stocks where you have to jump through a few extra hoops to be able to deal. Some brokers require extra forms to be filled and others will let you deal but only over the phone.

I think SMT has been focussing on China for a little while now (there were early investors in Alibaba for example) but as the Chinese market has done so well recently it’s now getting more attention and has become a bigger part of the portfolio. But it’s certainly a marmite region when it comes to investing.

BG US Growth is a trust I aim to look at in the next few months. I may look at BG China Growth, too.

Thanks for the heads up about the wrong link – that should work now.

There was a little more overlap with SMT than I expected but then it was the testing bed for this strategy in some ways so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised.

I think there are 21 SMT unlisted investments that aren’t in Schiehallion (many of which I would guess SMT bought before MNTN existed) and I would expect the two portfolios to will become less similar over time. The overlaps that currently exist only make up about 13% of the SMT portfolio.

MNTN seems to be available on both HL and II, at least that’s what the quote pages on each site seem to indicate. Only MTNC comes up for me on EQi though. It doesn’t seem to come up on Halifax Share Dealing so I suspect it won’t be on iWeb or Lloyds as I think Halifax operates the back-end for both of them.