UK inflation dropped to 3% in January, its lowest level since last March, according to the Office for National Statistics. Growth in the consumer price index fell from 3.4% in December, driven by lower food and petrol prices, but is still above the Bank of England’s 2% target. The FTSE 100 rallied 1% to 10,660 at the prospect of an interest rate cut when the central bank meets next month and for a weaker pound that would boost revenues of dollar earners.
Lindsell Train (LTI) fund managers Michael Lindsell and James Bullock have expanded on the argument for data analytics group RELX’s resilience to competition from artificial intelligence tools made earlier this month by colleague and Finsbury Growth & Income (FGT) manager Nick Train following a share price slump caused by Anthropic targeting the legal sector with 11 plugins to its Claude Cowork chatbot. In LTI’s latest update, Lindsell and Bullock say that Anthropic is targeting the larger and crowded $25bn legal workflow market rather than the $5bn reference data market that RELX “duopolises” with Thomson Reuters. “Anthropic’s Claude therefore feels a bigger threat to other legal AI start-ups such as OpenAi’s already launched Harvey legal tool.” They think the large language models (LLMs) of the AI companies will converge and that “the value is not accruing to bare models, but to the owners of the accurately reference and citable datasets upon which they are applied.” Consequently, RELX, a 6.1% position in the trust at 31 January, has seen legal revenues accelerate over the past two years from around 5% to 9% of its business today. London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), a 12.4% position, has a similarly strong data moat, they say. The managers point out that they held RELX through the mid-2010s “when its science business was supposedly threatened by open access and online self-publishing” but survived and flourished. LTI, a £127m investment trust with over 20% of assets in the Lindsell Train fund management business, saw net asset value fall 5.4% last month with its shares down 2.2%.
AVI Global Trust (AGT) has sold out of Aker, the Norwegian industrials group that it has held since 2008, making it the trust’s longest-held investment as well as its best performer in both 2025 and over the past 10 years. Fund manager Joe Bauernfreund said Aker had rerated with its discount to net asset value narrowing significantly from around 30% last July. Having generated an average annual local currency return of over 17% from Aker in the 18-year period, and enjoyed a four times return since its flotation in 2004 that was comparable to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the manager said he would be happy to reinvest when its discount widens again. “We believe [Aker chair] Kjell Rock to be one of the most tremendous creators of value in our universe.” AGT, an investor in undervalued listed funds and family holding companies, saw net asset value per share rise 2.6% last month ahead of the 0.9% gain in the MSCI All Country World index.
Digital 9 Infrastructure (DGI9), the former Triple Point fund in wind-down by InfraRed Capital Partners, has attracted the attentions of Armstrong Investments in the Isle of Man and Barnstaple-based financial planner Philip J Milton. Both respectively bought 5% and 5.2% stakes last week after DGI9 tumbled on news of a likely write-off in its largest investment in Arqiva, the indebted UK broadcasting platform.
Worsley Investors (WINV), the £9m UK smaller companies fund on a 46% discount, has bought a 4% stake in LMS Capital (LMS), the £13m private equity fund in wind-down and on a 53% discount.
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