The TM Brickwood Global Value Fund, co-managed by Ben Whitmore and Dermot Murphy marked its first anniversary on 20 March 2026. In this video, Ben and Dermot discuss the first year managing the Fund and where they are finding opportunities today.
The transcript is below.
How has the first year been?
Ben Whitmore (BW): It’s been absolutely great. Dermot and I have worked together for a long period now, and so whilst it’s exciting to start a new fund, at the same time, it’s also very much business as usual for Dermot and myself.
What has the market environment been like?
BW: The market environment has been, as ever, absolutely fascinating. The Fund launched at the time of the Trump tariffs. Since then, we’ve had lots of big macro things to deal with, whether it’s the excitement about AI or the potential for a recovery in European and UK economies, [or] the relationship politically-wise around the world. So there has been a lot going on in terms of the big picture. But for us, that’s not the area we try and concentrate on and understand too much. We spend our time looking at individual companies.
How do you filter out the market noise?
BW: Clearly, you pick up what’s going on – you read it in the newspaper or hear it on the radio. But at the portfolio level, for us, one of the key things is diversification. So we want a well-diversified portfolio. We’ve got just over 50 investments.
Dermot Murphy (DM): We have a very broad range of bets that we’re taking within the Fund, and that includes by both region and also by sector. And so no single theme accounts for more than about 10% of the Fund. We’ve got roughly equal amounts of revenue generated within the Fund in the US, in Asia, and in Europe. That means that if something unexpected happens, it’s unlikely to derail the performance of the entire portfolio.
Can you highlight a stock that has performed well?
BW: Unilever Indonesia is a company that’s operated, and the majority is owned by, Unilever PLC, the British and Dutch company. The operations in Indonesia haven’t been run that well, but the brands are very strong. We bought into that when there are a lot of worries about it losing market share – it’s got a very dominant market share in Indonesia – and the management team have started to restore the health of the business. And so the stock market has gone from being very worried to not worried at all. And that, that has led to a big change in the valuation. And so that’s been one of our top contributors since we launched the Fund. One of our other very big contributors during the year has been Samsung.
DM: We invested in Samsung in April of 2025. And at the time it was trading on a CAPE yield of just over 7%. Now, most people know Samsung from their consumer electronics business, so their phones or TVs, but actually the core of Samsung is in memory chips where they’re the world’s number one.
The reason Samsung was on a low valuation was, number one, the memory industry is cyclical and profits were cyclically low at that time. And, number 2, there were concerns that in the move to the new type of chips that will be required for AI, that Samsung had lost its technological leadership to a competitor. And it was taking quite a long time for their most recent chip to gain certification from their biggest customer, who is Nvidia, and that was leading to a depressed share price.
What’s happened since is that Samsung has been able to gain certification for those new type of AI chips. The industry has recovered, and the shares have done incredibly well. So we’ve more than doubled our money in those shares.
I think that one of the reasons it’s interesting is that people often assume that value investors can’t invest in the latest trends and the latest technological innovations. But Samsung is a global market leader at the forefront of this boom in AI spending. And yet at the time it was on a CAPE yield of over 7%. So we can and do invest in these good companies that are innovating and are leading their industries. but at the same time we won’t invest at any price.
What hasn’t worked so well?
BW: WPP, the advertising company, there they’ve changed the leader and there are worries that AI is going to disintermediate advertising companies. Those shares are on an exceptionally low valuation now and they’ve performed poorly, but we do think if there’s a new leader who can bring some stability and leadership to the business that, given just how low the valuation is – it’s on at most about 4 times earnings – that unless you think the business is almost disappearing in the next few years, then there is the chance to make, you know, quite a lot of money there, even though the shares have performed pretty poorly already.
Tell us about your geographic exposure
BW: The UK, America and Japan are our 3 largest exposures in the Global Value Fund. UK and America just a bit more than Japan, and that really is driven by the opportunities we see. We don’t start with a top-down view and say we’d like to have, you know, a lot of money in America or Japan or the UK. That’s driven by where we see the valuation opportunity, but it’s definitely fair to say that South Korea and Japan have been very strong. America has been actually in the last year not as strong as the other markets. That’s a very unusual combination. The UK has also been pretty strong.
How has the portfolio changed in the past year?
DM: The reality is that there hasn’t been that much that’s changed in the past year. So, you know, we’re long-term investors and one year is a very short length of time. And so the portfolio is broadly similar to the portfolio that we launched with 12 months ago, and that’s as you would expect for investors with a 3 to 5 year time horizon. But we have made tweaks at the margin, so we’ve had some companies that have performed well and where we’ve recycled the capital into other areas of the market which have performed poorly.
BW: So the portfolio turnover in the Global Fund is a little bit higher than the UK Fund because there are so many stock opportunities to look at, and we’d probably think that we’d turn over the portfolio within 4 years – [that] would be a good approximation.
Is there any crossover with the UK Fund?
BW: They’ve got a lot of similarities. They’re run with the same philosophy, [the] same investment process, but clearly the major difference is that in the UK, we’re looking at probably about 300 companies to invest in and choose securities from, whereas globally, the set of companies we’re looking at is probably 3,000. So there’s a much wider set of industries and geographies to look at globally.
What do you make of the current environment?
DM: Historically, investing in the stock market has been a very reliable way to build wealth over time. But the stock market isn’t always safe. There are times where the market has an above-average amount of risk, and we think that the current environment is one of those occasions. There are two reasons [for this]. The first is valuation. Stock markets around the world are extremely expensive. So for example, we have data for the US market which dominates the global benchmark going back 150 years. And the US stock market has only ever been more expensive than it is currently on one occasion in history, and that was at the very peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999-2000. With valuations as high as they currently are, that suggests very low returns for investors going forward.
Do you think we are in the midst of a dotcom-type bubble?
BW: You know, there are some parallels, but I do think there are some big differences this time. It’s not a question of loss-making companies on very high valuations. Here, it’s some unbelievably profitable companies choosing to spend enormous sums of money on AI, and here the stock market’s unsure as to whether they’ll be able to earn a return on that. So I think there are some parallels, but there are also some big differences.
What is the second aspect that concerns you?
DM: The second issue with the current environment is concentration. When people invest in a broad diversified index like the MSCI All Countries World Index, they assume that they’re getting a very broad diversified exposure, and that’s a reasonable assumption to make because there are thousands of companies in that index. The issue is that the very largest companies dominate the index, and so for example, the top 10 companies within the benchmark now account for close to 25% of the market cap, and those 10 companies are all effectively a bet on the same thing: on AI. And if you add in the Chinese AI companies and the chipmakers on top of that, you get to close to 30% of the index betting on a single theme. Now, that theme – AI – may turn out to change the world, but we think that having so much of your of capital placed on a single bet is, is, is, is far too risky.
BW: And what it means is that small movements by those companies clearly affect the benchmark a lot. So, in the short term, the performance of those very, very large companies will dominate the benchmark return. But over the longer run, that level of concentration is very, very unusual. And so I would expect in 5 and 10 years’ time, the index to be much less concentrated.
Where are you finding opportunities today?
BW: So I think globally there’s always companies that are out of favour across a multitude of sectors, but I’d probably say at the moment there are quite a few opportunities in areas that have had quite a tough last few years. So that might be consumer discretionary, it might be drinks and spirits companies, it might be chemical companies. There are a range of areas that do look very attractively valued.
I think it’s worth saying that for the first time in quite a while though, financials don’t screen nearly as well. So they were exceptionally lowly valued a few years ago, but now we’re not really seeing many financials.
It’s become quite clear that there’s also paradoxically quite an opportunity set in the American market. So the American stock market is the most highly valued major stock market around the world, but the bottom decile of companies by valuation in America are very attractively valued. So we’ve been looking there as well.
DM: So it’s interesting, clearly the US is an extremely expensive equity market. And clearly it dominates the broad global indices. So I think it accounts for close to 60% of the MSCI All Countries World Index. And the natural thing for a value investor would be to look at that and say, okay, we don’t want to invest in the US and we’ll look elsewhere. But the interesting thing is that when you scratch beneath the surface, we can actually find quite a lot of lowly valued companies within the US. And the cheapest companies within the US are just as cheap, if not cheaper, than other regions around the world.
That is surprising. It’s also a change relative to the last few years. So we’re seeing an increase in the number of cheap companies coming through our screens from the US. We are still underweight the US. We think that putting 60% of the portfolio into a single region is far too much, no matter how big the weight is in the global benchmark. But where we do find opportunities in the US, we’re finding some extremely attractive characteristics. By and large, they’re reasonably high-quality franchises, they’re international businesses, the ones that we’re looking at have reasonable balance sheets, and they are extremely lowly valued.
- Insights