SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting to Jako de Jager, head of retail portfolio solutions at Momentum and one of the managers of the Momentum Future Trends Fund. Jako, I appreciate the time today. Thematic investing – often when we think thematic, we kind of think of value versus growth or momentum or something. You’re saying, well, hang on a sec, there are other ways of doing it, and you and your fund are focusing on mega trends.
SIMON BROWN: I take your point, and this does impact investing. Some of [these things include] climate change, which has been around since the seventies and is now really gathering traction. Others [such as artificial intelligence] really took off with ChatGPT late last year. These are going to play out over decades, and they’re going to have major implications, probably in the short, certainly the medium, and definitely the long term.
SIMON BROWN: Yes. It’s not going to be that straight line. There’s a phrase out there [that] sometimes being early [is] indistinguishable from being wrong. It can feel weird sometimes. In the fund that you’re running, what are some of those mega trends that you have identified? SIMON BROWN: And a key point there perhaps, if we stay with space exploration, is that SpaceX isn’t listed. We can’t invest directly into it, but there are the allied industries there. There is helium which goes into it, there’s the manufacturer of the rockets. So that’s often how you’re going to get that exposure into those trends, particularly in the earlier days.