Opulion, analysis of listed investment companies

Listed investment companies

The market shows you the price.

Opulion shows you what you own.

Holdings and investment trusts analysed one by one, then brought together in your portfolios to follow their news and see your real exposures.

With the independent eye of an investment practitioner,Quentin de VironLinkedIn

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17companies covered

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Opulion helps you know which ones.

They are called listed investment companies. Their business is owning the others.

A single listed share can make you the indirect owner of dozens of companies.

When you hold several holdings or investment trusts, some positions, some sectors or some regions can appear more than once in your wealth without you seeing it straight away.

See what one of these companies looks like

The price reaches you in a second.

Nothing else does.

What these companies own is written in public documents. They still have to be read from end to end.

The share price is everywhere: free, instant, updated by the second. The list of companies held is scattered across reports running to hundreds of pages, published in several languages, with methods of calculation that change from one company to the next. Nothing is hidden. All of it is long.

We read those documents in full, we rebuild what they contain, and next to every figure we write where it came from and when it was published. When a document is missing, we say so instead of filling the gap.

See that work on one company

An index follows a rule.

Here, people decide.

You trust them on a family name, a long history, a reputation. That trust can be checked.

An index fund, meaning a fund that does no more than reproduce a list of shares drawn up in advance, buys what that list tells it to buy, in the proportions the list sets. It is clean, it is predictable, and you know in advance what you are getting. That is a merit.

A listed investment company works differently. People choose which companies to buy, at what moment, which ones to hold while others are selling, and which ones to let go. Many have been run by the same family for generations, and buy a company knowing they will hold it through crashes and recoveries. When you buy their share, those are the people you are handing your money to.

Trust can be checked. You can find out who runs it and since when, by what discipline, and what that discipline produced, one financial year after another, in the order things happened. That is what we go and look for, and we write down where each piece came from.

See who runs it, and since when

You hold two or three of them.

Nobody can tell you what you actually own.

It is a normal, common situation. It is also the one nothing lets you read.

Holding several of these companies makes sense. Each has its own team, its own history, its own way of working, and plenty of serious investors hold two, three, sometimes more.

The trouble is that their contents overlap. The same company can sit inside two of them with nothing telling you so. A sector can weigh far more once the lines are added up than it does in any one of them alone. And the part of what you hold that cannot be sold overnight is written nowhere. None of these companies can tell you: each knows only itself. Your account statement will not tell you either: it shows you lines, not what is inside them.

We add up what they own, and we let you see through. You choose the companies, you choose their weights, you choose the date. We rebuild what it comes to once they are put together.

We add up by broad categories: what can be sold easily and what cannot, the nature of each holding, the sector. We go down to the name of a company when we are sure it is the same one on both sides, and we stop when we are not. Whatever we could not break down stays visible as such: we never spread it over the rest to make the total come out round.

This is not an allocation built for you. We do not know your goals, your horizon, or the rest of what you hold. We show what your selection contains, and nothing else.

No combined figure, and here is why

These companies do not measure their weights against the same whole. Adding up shares that do not refer to the same denominator would give a number that adds up neatly and means nothing. We do not compute it, and we do not show it greyed out either: a grey total is still a total, and a reader reads it.

Bases found: of the published portfolio, of an unestablished base.

Start from a selection that is already set up.

See through this selection Or build your own.

This view is yours. The page address replays it exactly, and an account keeps it under a name, ready at the next published reporting date.

Keep this view See through several companies

Your screen shows a name and a price.

We let you see through it.

One page per company. The same questions, in the same order, every time.

Every company we follow has its page. It answers the same questions, in the same order, in the same words as this one:

And when you hold several of them, the same questions, asked once over the whole.

You hold several. See them as one.

One. Try it before you commit anything.

You are torn between two of these companies. Or you wonder what a little more of one and a little less of the other would come to. Build it here, look at what it gives you, change the weights, start again. Nothing is bought, nothing is committed, nothing is passed on to anyone. You are rehearsing, before you play for real.

Two. Keep the view, and let it bring itself up to date.

The view you have just built will age: the companies publish, what they own changes, your weights do not. An account keeps your selection under a name and reads it again at the next published reporting date. You come back, and without redoing a thing you see whether your positions overlap and where your exposure concentrates.

Three. Soon, your own tools will read your figures here.

You have already pasted a table into a chat window to ask an assistant what it made of it. You re-pasted the columns by hand, fixed the dates, and you were not sure it had read all of it. We are preparing the opposite: your tools will come and read your portfolios and our data where they live, and answer you on your own figures, not on a general example.

In development. We will announce it as open on the day it is.

One word, to be clear. What these screens give you is a composition, not advice. An allocation built for you would call for your goals, your horizon, your tolerance for risk and the rest of what you own. We do not know them, we do not ask you for them, and we will never tell you to buy or to sell.

We do not promise you a better spread. We show you what you actually own, overlaps and concentrations included, and you judge for yourself. A salesman promises. We show.

Understand before you act. The rest is yours.

See through my own positions

An address is enough. We send you a link that opens the door. No password.

The Opulion letter

One letter when a company page is published. Never more often.