BB Healthcare expanding rapidly – BB Healthcare has announced results for the year ended 30 November 2019. Over that period, the trust lagged its benchmark, returning 6.6% in NAV terms and 6.9% in share price terms against 8.6% for the MSCI World Healthcare Index. However, the board is focusing on the trust’s three year numbers – it has just past its third birthday – and here the news is better with 8.4% outperformance. This is relevant as they want investors to look at the results of the fund on a rolling three year basis.
The dividend was 4.85p and the board has said that this will rise to 5p for the year ended November 2020.
Money has been pouring into the company – the shares in issue increased by 36% over the course of the financial year to 434m and 2.1m shares have been issued since.
[The rate of expansion is remarkable given the returns during the year, which were towards the bottom end of the peer group. However, maybe in this instance they are convincing investors to look to the long term. Over three years, only Syncona has done better in NAV terms (we discount Adams which is tiny).]
Contributions to returns
“Once again, it was our largest holdings that generated the greatest returns. Lonza and Humana’s share price performance across the 12 months belies significant intra-year volatility – both stocks had a trough-to-peak move of 45% during the year and adjusting our position sizing, these price fluctuations contributed to the material positive returns.
On the negative side; Evolent Health, Nektar, Akcea and CareDx are all smaller companies that suffered greatly in the volatility over the summer, with the first three seeing setbacks around the investment thesis that underpins their place in the portfolio. None of these are material to the longer-term investment case and we continue to hold positions in all four. As discussed in our April 2019 Factsheet, we exited our exposure to the drug retail supply chain (Walgreens Boots and AmerisourceBergen) due to the sentiment overhang regarding drug pricing reform, opioid litigation and increasing competition.”