Mirabaud - Global Focus A cap. USD

Performance update

April was a wild month in markets, but somehow the end result was a positive return for the MSCI AC World Index, which had been down -10% on 8 April, before recovering some +12% into month-end. You can pick almost any market stress barometer - they were all severely tested during the month. It seems that the most significant test, the one that forced Trump to change course, was the US 30-year Treasury yield hitting 5%. As soon as this level was reached, Trump walked back on his tariff demands, offering a 90-day delay to some countries before the imposition of the higher rates.

Within the fund, stock selection drove relative returns. The largest contributions to relative performance came from more defensive positions in North America, such as Loblaw, the Canadian discount retailer. We also saw a rebound in TRIP.com, which had initially dipped on earnings as the company lowered its margin expectations for the year, but longer-term investors then stepped in as the company is increasing investment to drive home its competitive advantage.

Novo Nordisk continued to underperform, with the market still digesting the disappointing CagriSema weight-loss drug results, as well as some signs of market-share loss relative to Lily. The stock is trading very cheap relative to history and relative to attractive growth expectations.

Portfolio activity

We sold out of Advantest during the month. Advantest is the leading player in semiconductor testing, with 65% share in high bandwidth memory and 100% share in GPU testing for AI. With DeepSeek, we believe there is better risk/reward elsewhere. We continue to look to keep the number of names in the fund down and stock risk high.

Elsewhere, we topped up Netflix. We continue to believe that Netflix is best-in-class in terms of content; pricing is coming through, as well as significant acceleration in net adds driven by the ad-supported layer.