Focused Equity Quarterly Report | April 2026

Focused Equity ETF – Key Takeaways

Investing Environment

The stock market has been unsettled by events in Iran, with day-to-day volatility elevated as investors lurch from one headline to the next.

The immediate economic risk lies in oil. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz removes roughly 15 million barrels a day from the market. The Brent crude price rose 75% during the quarter, approaching $120 a barrel,[1] and the squeeze is showing up in physical markets, with reports of TotalEnergies trading Middle Eastern cargoes at well above $160.[2]

Households are already feeling the pressure at the pump, with US gasoline reaching $4 a gallon in March.[3] But the larger effects usually come later, as inventories are depleted and businesses must restock at higher prices.

The effects of this crisis are spreading more widely – farmers will feel it in fertiliser, while European utilities and households will face increased gas prices. The incipient strains are visible in some places, with restrictions urged, such as work-from-home mandates for civil servants, and public appeals to reduce electricity consumption.[4]

The broader effects on spending and confidence have yet to emerge. Much will depend on how long the situation lasts. For now, markets still seem to be pricing for a temporary disruption rather than recession. That may well prove correct, if the ceasefire now in place holds beyond the two weeks initially negotiated and if tanker traffic resumes durably. If flows in the Strait are on and off again for a long period of time, the damage will certainly be greater than investors are currently factoring in.

Beyond the shock to the energy market, private credit made headlines as leading asset managers — including Blackstone, BlackRock and Blue Owl — were forced to gate their funds in the face of heavy redemption requests.[5][6] Clients, already rattled by the high-profile bankruptcies of First Brands and Tricolor (labelled “cockroaches” by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon), grew anxious that asset values were not being honestly marked. At $2 trillion, private credit is not systemic in itself — but in an interconnected financial system, any falling domino makes people nervous.[7]

Amid increased turbulence, the relentless build-out of compute infrastructure emerged as a genuine bright spot. The five largest hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Oracle — are on track to spend over $600 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, up 36% from an already extraordinary 2025. At close to 15% of total US fixed asset investment, this spending wave is large enough to move national accounts and benefit semiconductor designers, semiconductor equipment suppliers, electrical and power component manufacturers, and the broader ecosystem of infrastructure suppliers – with providers finding themselves with more demand than they can easily satisfy … as long as the spending spree lasts.[8]

Not all aspects of the AI trade fared as well. Software stocks sold off sharply, as investors fled the sector indiscriminately in what commentators have dubbed “SaaSapocalypse” — pricing in a rapid and near-total disruption of business models that, in many cases, have yet to show meaningful cracks.[9]

Portfolio activity last quarter

We added to most of our software holdings during the quarter, taking advantage of what we believe is an indiscriminate sell-off driven more by fear than analysis. At times, an obscure research note or a new Anthropic product announcement was enough to erase billions of dollars of market value from companies that had not reported anything fundamentally wrong.

AI is expected to have a profound effect on software. We do not dismiss that. But we think investors are drawing too few distinctions. Software that offers little more than convenience, or that solves narrow problems without embedding itself in customer workflows, is clearly more vulnerable. By contrast, the businesses we own sit much closer to the operating core of large enterprises. Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft are not simply vendors of code — they are woven into how large organisations manage customers, workflows, data, permissions and day-to-day operations. Replacing them is like reinventing how the whole enterprise functions.

What makes that reinvention so difficult is not the technology, it is everything built around it. Over time, through direct distribution and the breadth of their platforms, these companies have accumulated a deep understanding of each customer’s specificities — their workflows, their challenges, the way the platform has been configured and extended through years of shared investment. It is precisely this foundation that positions the companies to deliver AI tools that are immediately relevant and grounded in real workflow data — powered by whichever LLM or cloud infrastructure fits the customer best.

This point is perhaps most evident in the case of Constellation Software, which specialises in niche, vertical software where deep domain knowledge is required. In each of its hundreds of verticals, Constellation is typically the first port of call when customers seek to adopt new technology. The value of that distribution model and those relationships do not diminish as AI advances; if anything, it increases.

Constellation is also an acquisition vehicle — one that has compounded value over decades through an almost obsessive discipline around acquisition price. A market sell-off and tighter funding conditions mean more motivated sellers and less competition, giving Constellation more opportunity to redeploy its growing cash flows into deals that meet its above 20% return targets. At 13 times free cash flow, we are paying a low price for that compounding machine.

Tencent is China’s dominant digital ecosystem. Everything flows through WeChat — a super-app combining messaging, payments, content and commerce that functions more like a mobile operating system than a social platform. With 1.3 billion monthly users,[10] any service built on WeChat inherits its user base instantly. The model is self-reinforcing: engagement generates transaction data, data improves ad targeting, better ads deepen merchant activity, strengthening WeChat Pay, which makes WeChat more central to daily life. Beyond its operating businesses, Tencent holds minority stakes across China’s digital economy (Meituan, JD.com, Pinduoduo) — gaining distribution access and competitive intelligence without full operational ownership.[11]

We think Tencent’s P&L does not fully reflect the company’s true underlying earning power.[12] First, advertising monetisation remains structurally underexploited. WeChat’s ad load is deliberately kept well below industry peers, and as closed-loop capabilities mature, there is potential for improvement. Second, the recent launch of Mini Shops represents an emerging e-commerce franchise of real scale, embedding transactional commerce natively within WeChat’s social graph — a differentiated alternative to Alibaba and Pinduoduo without the fulfilment complexity. Finally, we think AI is quietly transforming the economics of the core business: Hunyuan is already driving measurable lift in ad targeting and content recommendations, Tencent Cloud is scaling profitably on enterprise AI workloads, and agentic AI solutions embedded across WeChat’s mini program ecosystem could potentially unlock an entirely new monetisation layer across millions of merchant and developer relationships.[13]

Other than these core positions, we made several smaller portfolio adjustments. We added to Uber, where the franchise continues to develop well and the discount to our assessed fair value went up as the stock price consolidated.

Beyond taking profit in our two defence stocks, we sold Applied Materials and Service Corp, and Adobe, as we want to focus on companies with the strongest franchises. We also trimmed ASML where the margin of safety had narrowed.

Macro outlook

We do not let ourselves be distracted by the current geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty. Our strategy is one that aims to compound wealth by selecting high-quality assets bought for less than they are worth — businesses with the ability to grow their earning power and return meaningful capital to shareholders for many years to come.

That means when we add a business to our portfolio, we do so assuming we will hold it through periods of turbulence like these — recessions, financial stress, political upheaval, trade disruption, military conflict. These are not tail risks. Most, if not all, are likely to materialise over the next decade. That is why, when evaluating any investment, we ask ourselves whether we would be comfortable owning it if the stock market closed for 10 years. If the answer is not a resounding yes, we should not buy it.

Past performance is not indicative of future performance and when you invest in ETFs your capital is at risk

Focused Equity ETF Performance
As of 31.08.2026

FEP (Fund)SFEPNTRC (Index)
1M4.29%4.33%
3M5.43%5.61%
6M7.25%7.56%
YTD8.42%8.84%
12M14.79%15.61%
3Y-41.71%
Since Inception (16/05/2024)22.43%24.72%


Please note that all performance figures are showing net data. Source: Bloomberg / HANetf. Data as of 31.08.2026

Performance before inception is based on back-tested data. Backtesting is the process of evaluating an investment strategy by applying it to historical data to simulate what the performance of such a strategy would have been. Back-tested data does not represent actual performance and should not be interpreted as an indication of actual or future performance. Past performance for the index is in USD. Past performance is not an indicator for future results and should not be the sole factor of consideration when selecting a product. Investors should read the prospectus of the Issuer (“Prospectus”) before investing and should refer to the section of the Prospectus entitled ‘Risk Factors’ for further details of risks associated with an investment in this product. When you invest in ETFs your capital is at risk.

[1] Source: Lloyd Capital, Bloomberg. Data as of 31.03.2026

[2] https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2026/03/totalenergies-reaped-more-1b-profit-iran-war-what-know#:~:text=After%20the%20Strait%20of%20Hormuz’s,firm%20Kpler%20on%20March%2015.

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8d47vzz13o

[4] https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/government-urged-make-april-work-33772360

[5] https://www.ft.com/content/f4320148-3d81-4bd0-9ab6-053a5bade188?syn-25a6b1a6=1

[6] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blackrock-won-t-let-billionaires-141658541.html

[7] https://www.nb.com/insights/article-lessons-from-first-brands-and-tricolor

[8] https://techblog.comsoc.org/2025/12/22/hyperscaler-capex-600-bn-in-2026-a-36-increase-over-2025-while-global-spending-on-cloud-infrastructure-services-skyrockets/

[9] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2026/03/26/rethinking-the-saas-apocalypse/

[10] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/wechat-statistics/

[11] https://freedom24.com/ideas/details/20553

[12] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/TCEHY/financials/

[13] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencent-integrates-wechat-with-openclaw-ai-agent-amid-china-tech-battle-2026-03-22/#:~:text=Users%20have%20rushed%20to%20install,Purchase%20Licensing%20Rights

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