June Investment Trust Sector Newsletter
SpaceX IPO: Impact on the investment trust sector
SpaceX’s long-awaited IPO arrived on 12 June. Priced at $135 per share, it closed the day up 19%, implying a $2.1tn market cap. The deal was more than three times oversubscribed, with the company raising $75bn upfront ($85.7bn including the exercise of the ‘greenshoe’ overallotment).
The price uplift from the largest ever IPO rippled across the investment trust sector, benefiting Scottish Mortgage (SMT), whose largest holding is SpaceX at c 25% of the portfolio. Other holders of SpaceX pre-IPO include: Schiehallion (MNTN), Edinburgh Worldwide (EWI), Baillie Gifford US Growth (USA), RIT Capital Partners (RCP) and Matador Secondary Private Equity (SQL).
Amid excitement around the SpaceX IPO, SMT’s lead manager, Tom Slater, urged investors to remain cautious about short-term risks and share price volatility, suggesting SpaceX shares could double or halve in a few days, while highlighting the risk from having such a large part of SMT’s portfolio in a single stock.
Although investors are focusing on SpaceX for its future growth prospects, at the IPO price, the company was valued at a very lofty 92x price-to-sales multiple. The stock has not been immune from recent weakness in the technology sector, due to concerns around high capex, AI infrastructure costs and stubbornly high interest rates. The announcement of a $25bn SpaceX bond sale, so soon after the IPO, also increases debate about whether the technology sector is in a bubble.
SpaceTech surge: ICEYE secures ‘decacorn’ valuation
SpaceX was not the only name lighting up the spacetech sector in June. Finnish satellite start-up ICEYE secured a valuation of more than €10bn on 9 June after raising €450m in a series-F round led by General Atlantic. Seraphim Space Investment Trust (SSIT), where ICEYE is the largest holding at 47% of the portfolio, surged 13.6%. SSIT had already been promoted to the UK 250 index earlier in the month, following its £137m C-share fundraise and a 39% share price gain year to date – the ICEYE revaluation adds further weight to that momentum. Molten Ventures (GROW) was similarly buoyed; with ICEYE its fifth-largest position, Molten’s shares jumped 10.7% on the day.
Worldwide Healthcare Trust: A return to form
Worldwide Healthcare Trust (WWH) published its FY26 annual results on 5 June, reporting NAV and share price total returns of 10.0% and 13.1% respectively – well ahead of the benchmark’s 1.8% return and representing NAV outperformance of 8.2 percentage points. The recovery was particularly noteworthy given that healthcare stocks remained under pressure for much of the year, with US drug pricing and tariff uncertainty weighing on sentiment until agreements between the Trump administration and major biopharmaceutical companies provided clarity from September 2025 onwards.
As highlighted in our recent note, the standout performance contributor was WWH’s proprietary Biotech M&A Basket, which returned 55.9% in sterling terms and added 5.6 percentage points to total return, driven by acquisitions including Exact Sciences (by Abbott Laboratories), Avidity Biosciences (Novartis) and Apellis Pharmaceuticals (Biogen). The trust’s shares trade at a 7.6% discount to NAV, far narrower than the 13.0% peer average – the board continues to support the rating through buybacks. Managers Sven Borho and Trevor Polischuk at OrbiMed believe healthcare is at a more attractive entry point than it has been for some time, with biotech valuations reasonable and M&A activity expected to remain robust.
Templeton Emerging Markets: Semiconductors power a standout year
Templeton Emerging Markets (TEMIT) also released its full-year results at the start of June – the trust delivered an impressive share price total return of 48.6% and a NAV total return of 41.3% for the year to end-March 2026, significantly outperforming the MSCI Emerging Markets Index’s 26.8% total return. The primary driver of outperformance was the trust’s significant weighting to Asian semiconductors, within a meaningfully overweight IT allocation. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), TEMIT’s largest holding, benefited from its dominant position in advanced chip manufacturing, and SK Hynix, its second-largest holding, made strong gains on rising memory prices and AI-driven demand growth. Manager Chetan Sehgal expects AI to drive ‘strong demand for many years to come’. TEMIT’s momentum has accelerated further in the first few months of FY27, with share price and NAV total returns of 29.8% and 27.8% since the beginning of April.
