Venture

Venture explores opportunities in equities, commodities, FX and bonds, focusing on higher risk, higher return. Like all things ByteTree, Venture embraces value investing principles around the world. However, unlike our other services, Venture is aimed at experienced investors looking for a wider range of potential opportunities, who understand the associated risks.

Venture explores opportunities that are potentially more complex, sometimes controversial, and easy to dismiss. An example might be a company that trades in a sector or country that is deemed to be risky. Alternatively, it could be excluded by institutional investment processes embracing ethical overlays that might reject companies in industries such as defence, energy or tobacco.

For example, in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, defence stocks rose significantly while few institutions owned them. These companies were not engaged in illegal activities, and their customers were major governments, yet it had become common practice for investment funds to reject them on ethical grounds. As a result, defence stocks were undervalued, in some cases significantly. After the invasion, many institutions revised their policies to acknowledge that defence was a legitimate industry to ensure national security. Defence stocks were rerated.

Some of the securities in Venture might be less liquid than other ByteTree recommendations, making them harder to trade. They could also be more esoteric and harder to access on normal retail broking platforms. They could also be volatile.

If that hasn’t put you off, as it was intended to do, then Venture will give you ad hoc recommendations as and when they appear. They will mainly be in equities from Europe and the USA, but from time to time will be in other asset classes. Given that Venture clients are expected to be experienced investors, the investment case presented will be more concise than in other services.

Charlie Morris is the Editor of Venture. He is also the Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of ByteTree, which he founded in 2014 as a platform to deliver independent, robust and thought-provoking market analysis.

Charlie has 25 years of fund management experience and is a pioneer of multi-asset investing. At HSBC Global Asset Management, he launched the Absolute Return Service in 2002, which grew to over $3 billion. Much of that success came from moving away from the crowd and embracing a wider range of asset classes that traditional investors were not familiar with at the time.

Subsequently, Charlie managed the Total Return Fund at Atlantic House Fund Management until June 2020, at which point it was ranked number 1 out of 48 funds in the Trustnet Target Absolute Return Sector. He sits on the investment committee for the Society of Technical Analysis and on the Board of Halkin Services, a renowned investment think tank. He has regularly been featured in leading news publications and has given numerous presentations to investment bodies and Universities. Charlie's pioneering gold valuation model, developed in 2012, was published by the London Mastels Bullion Association (LBMA) and the World Gold Council (WGC). It is widely regarded as a major contribution to understanding the behaviour of the gold price.

Prior to a career in finance, Charlie served as an officer in the Grenadier Guards, British Army, having graduated from the Royal Academy Sandhurst in 1994.

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