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Share price still depressed despite regular share buy backs. As ever a good way of destroying shareholder value.

Don't get too sensitive about it. I merely asked the question as to how the rest of the portfolio has performed over the past few years. I have been investing for 45 years and it;s always worth asking the difficult questions. SMT is down 42% on the year. BG American has gone from top performer to down 45% in 2022. Tesla was one lucky investment out of a lot of bets so I am looking at the success rate, which is actually quite low. SMT is more like a VC operator.
My SMT holding is still around £50k and as it's a small part of my portfolio I will probably keep it.

Just a thought but has anyone seen any figures about what SMT's performance would have been over the past few years without TESLA ??

There was a discussion on the BBC Today programme this morning about a research programme at Edinburgh Univ about developing cures for this that don't really exist yet and that it was being funded to the tune of about £15m by BG . They clearly have a view that biotech is where it's all going and as a retired scientist I can only agree. The problem really is that curing sick people is one of the areas where you are not supposed to make a profit, after all

From my experience of investing over the past 45 years this is just the time when you should be buying if you have spare cash. Whenever I look back I see missed opportunities although at the time it was difficult to see the potential upside through the doom and gloom. Oh and don't forget that it's on;y a paper loss at the moment.

They have just done it. "On 13 April 2022 the Company purchased 3,731 ordinary shares at a price of 956.98p"

If you listen to the various webinars about SMT they refer to how a lot of their early investments in start up businesses go nowhere but that a few are very successful and make up for the many failures. To me SMT operates more like a VC company and if you strip out Tesla over the past few years the performance is pedestrian. Just look at other BG funds like the American that topped the funds list but is now down about 30% this year and the story repeats itself across BG funds with a Tesla component. So hopefully they have a few more in the pipeline (Moderna perhaps?)

Out of interest
performance of SMTsince 1st jan 2022 -27%since 1st jan 2021 -22%since 1st jan 2020 +5.5%since 1st jan 2019 +113%I wonder how much of this was down to lucky bet on Tesla?

I was just wondering what percentage of peoples' portfolios are in SMT? Mine is currently about 7%. It was at about 14% last year but I offloaded some on the way down this year. I will probably leave it where it is , it;s dropped 25% since Jan 1st so needs a 33% rise to get back to the start of the year. I am 73 so not looking at too many decades to recover :)

Sop now DGE is borrowing money by issuing bonds at the same time as buying back shares. Is this a way of boosting the share price? Terry Smith once said that he was wary of companies that buy back shares as it showed that they hadn't got a plan to use the cash to expand the business. I seem to recall that Tesco did this a few years ago and got into difficulties.

Share buybacks always seem a bit illogical to me. I know the theory behind it but when you announce that you are doing a buyback programme then it is bound to increase the share price and hence reduce the number of shares that you can buy back. Sounds like a value destruction strategy

I watched the youtube video. Very interesting but very much like any other fund manager's videos really. The general message is always that you need to measure over long periods of time and ignore short term etc. Basically they earn money by taking a slice of the total value of the fund/trust

bear in mind that this trust is just over 3 years old and originally issued at £10 so even at today's low price it's 54% up on the IPO and it's trading at a discount. What concerns me is that it has fallen by about the same amount as SMT in 2022 and SMT is a normally much more volatile beast with lots of unquoted stuff in it..

"When normality returns" One thing I have learned in 45 years of investing is that there is no "normality". We seem to stumble from one upset to the next. Even in the last few years we have had unusually low interest rates then Brexit, then Covid and now The Ukraine. A lot of investors talk about keeping a percentage of their wealth in cash for the next "correction" but they never see them coming. There is of course the trusted old adage of "buy on the sound of cannon fire and sell on the sound of bells". Good luck everyone

I am a lot more than £4k down on SMT . The problem is that a lot of the investments they make are in pre IPO companies so that selling down these assets is very difficult. It's actually more like a VC fund. I made the mistake of letting my stake in SMT grow to about 14% of my portfolio when in reality I should have top sliced it to around 5%. It's currently down to about 7.5% but I am loath to sell at the current price.

I bought some more DGE yesterday and then saw this Sushma message. I queried it with Interactive Investor and they said that it was a glitch on their system and not to worry.

Reported in FT last night
SoftBank’s $66bn sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry,

SSON seems to be issuing a lot of equity. I assume that this is a good thing to manage the premium/discount but how does it help existing shareholders?.

Just thinking about the fact that SMT has been around for 112 years and today it's largely known as a tech fund investing like a venture capital company. I wonder what it invested in during earlier periods like the 1920's and whether the style has changed over the decades as the investment landscape changed? for Tesla and Musk read Henry Ford perhaps?

@littlened "Dorset,SMT is a closed fund,an Investment Trust not a Unit Trust." I think you will find that BG takes a 0.3% of net assets management fee which goes up with the size of the trust