Tap into new opportunities

Over the years we’ve seen the investment landscape evolve dramatically. The industry has tied itself in knots trying to make something which, at its heart should be quite straightforward, into something of astonishing complexity.

They’re trying to solve for multiple competing issues, attempting to deliver consistent alpha while also ensuring acceptable performance volatility relative to a benchmark on a quarterly or annual basis. In order to do this, investors then have to trade frequently to time economic cycles, changes in bond yields, and so on - all within statistical risk parameters. The chances of a misstep whilst trying to juggle these competing factors is astonishingly high. The greatest threat to any portfolio is the risk of being repeatedly whipsawed, and it’s precisely this that leads to so many investors buying high and selling low.

How about we simply redefine our opportunity set and just invest all our capital in the world’s best companies and then leave it there for years, and years, and years. And that’s what the global unconstrained equity fund is. We invest all the assets into those few extraordinary companies that are both great now, and which we believe are highly likely to still be great in 10 years time.

So, if long-term capital growth is the primary objective, then we should just focus on that, and ignore all the noise. We start by completely ignoring the benchmark and then - build a portfolio which adheres to the following objectives:
 - Identify the rare companies that we believe have a very high likelihood of sustaining high returns for a decade and longer.
 - Select a small number of them in a concentrated portfolio to maximise their impact.
 - Hold them for a long time and allow them to compound for years and years.

This is what we mean by unconstrained investing. It’s a deeply fundamental, extremely simple approach designed for optimists who believe that the extraordinary opportunity set offered by equity markets could offer something better than benchmark returns. We therefore aim to invest in the winners. 

So the big question our clients in Asia are asking is the tremendous run that we have seen in the technology sector – if it's over, if it's hype, and will it continue?

Hi I'm Tony Kim. I'm the lead portfolio manager of the technology strategy for BlackRock.

My answer to this question is we're just getting going. And this is going to be the predominant theme for the rest of this decade. We are just in the early stages of the build out in the development, for AI and how that translates to the technology sector.

We look at AI from a full stack perspective, where we, decompose all the elements of AI, everything from energy to compute to software to models to data and to applications. We then look at all of those categories and subcategories, and we are investing along this whole stack.

We believe that this is going to continue throughout this decade. And so, in no means is it over. In fact, it's just beginning.