RE: Continutation Vote15 Mar 2024 09:43
Here's my comments post Tuesday's presentation...
I had a lengthy conversation with the manager and JPM sales person post their presentation. Here's what I extracted.
Discount - they're clearly frustrated by the scale of the discount and solutions to resolving that were being discussed by the Board / Manager. They agreed that some sort of plan needed to be put forward by the time Final Results were published in late June, ahead of the continuation vote. Their expectation was that the discount would start to narrow ahead of these events, but recognised, and agreed with me, that a solution to sustainably narrow the discount without a return of capital might be difficult to find given the nature of the investments in the trust. Some sort of tender offer was unlikely to happen given the size of the trust, although I wouldn't fully discount that (I don't think it would work or be appropriate). They said that historically if it has been the right thing to return cash to shareholders that is what they have done and would likely do this time, if that was felt it was the right thing to do.
Wind-down - In terms of how easy it would be to realise the assets in the trust, and in particular the private funds, they said that would likely take a number of quarter as redemption requests were met. They are through the lock-up periods in these vehicles, so there is no issue on that front, while JARA owns under 5% in each fund. That shouldn't cause any problems from a redemption perspective unless there is a wall of redemptions from other investors at the same time.
Share liquidity - There isn't much at present, so getting institutional buyers to take advantage of the discount is challenging, particularly when its difficult to see why any current holder would sell at such a wide discount with the continuation vote on the near horizon.
My overall conclusion remains that the risk / reward at current levels is an attractive one given the time horizons involved. The main risk is that we see a collapse in the NAV, but I think that is highly unlikely given the current macro backdrop and the 30% discount provides a good deal of downside protection.
I bought more this morning at 65p.