Where are you currently seeing the greatest disconnect between market attention and underlying value?

I should be clear ahead of time, we haven't thematically invested in AI.

That's not our way of approaching the investing problem.

But what we try to do is to calibrate to what we can see is actually happening in the world, and then thinking through the second and third order consequences.

And so some of the things that we've been successful in spotting was that memory pricing would be positively impacted because of the demand that's driven from AI chips.

And so while now it feels, you know, very obvious that the likes of Samsung and SK Hynix would be massive winners from AI, we were researching this 18 months ago when it was very far from the case that it would be obvious.

But we looked through what was happening, the technology, the supply chains, and thought that these companies would have, you know, earnings inflect very sharply positively for a sustained period, and so we've been invested there.

What was the reaction of you and your team when you started to see this massive sell-off in software stocks?

But I d- I don't know if that'll last beyond Salah moving on now.

Yeah, it's, uh, I think, yeah, I think the s- the skepticism is, is merited.

Uh, I've taught, I mean, in Oxford, I've taught race and immigration as a topic for 30-odd years.

And in the course of that, I've gone from kind of, yeah, from opt- well, perhaps inevitably, from optimism to pessimism.

You know, you, you, you do a, a scholarly topic like, um, you know, does, does the history of immigration into Britain sustain the, uh, notion that the British are a tolerant people or something like that.

And you get lots of, uh, sort of hand-wringing, um, liberal middle-class students saying, "No, it's absolutely..." You know, you, you, you see, you can imagine how you could construct, um, via obvious anecdotes, you know, Powell, et cetera, uh, an argument that, um, the British are routinely intolerant, um, and that racism is endemic and anthropological.

And I've always tried to strike a kind of optimistic counter-narrative as, as the product of, of multiracial West London myself.

[chuckles]

Is, is it just about the amount of cash being spent, or is there something more fundamental here?

So it's a, it's an interesting question, but I also think it's a, it's an impossible one to answer.

Um, what we, what we know is that, as you say, AI has been the hottest topic in investment markets for several years, and no, no one in the world doesn't know that this is happening.

Um, and you have a couple of, you know, flagship, very large companies that have done extraordinarily well based on this AI narrative.

Um, and I like to i- in moments like this, step back and try and be a student of history.

And so, you know, when we have a big technological shift, and you have a few companies which are apparently at the forefront of that shift, people tend to get very excited, and they extrapolate incredible performance for an awful long time, and they use that narrative to justify extraordinary valuationsAnd so if we look at the absolute size that these companies have got to in terms of their market capitalization, it's, it's far larger than anything you might have expected several years ago or that we've seen in history.

And so embedded within those, those huge valuations are incredibly optimistic expectations.

Um, how do you view those opportunities, and there are other, other sectors where you're looking and thinking, "That's interesting"?