The Lemon Fool

First some background : Kate Bingham was the chair of the UK's vaccine trust. She is interviewed here about the vaccine acquisitions strategy.
https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/ ... 286384093/

The Daily Mail called you a “brilliantly batty heroine of our Jabs Triumph”. How do you feel about that?
“I think it's entirely fine. I don't have any problem with that.”

The word batty is apt, she likes bog snorkelling apparently. Unsure whether that's a summer or winter sport.

Anyway given her success in picking vaccines, I wondered what else she did as she works for a venture capitalist company SV Health Investors, there are several venture capital funds she is involved in, which are out of reach for a normal private investor (minimum investment £5m). However IBT (of the post's title) is a UK AIM company that is investable in. She (Kate) is one of the investment managers on it : https://ibtplc.com/about
It's does not pay a dividend but is low PE of about 6 according to Yahoo finance and the price has not run away with itself.

That was enough for me to invest a small stake 1% of my share portfolio to see how it goes, more to go in if I enjoy owning it. My broker listed off a list of companies they own a stake in, none of which I recognised. So Kate and the low PE (which may be wrong, since I guess investment trusts take profits on their investments sometimes) is pretty much my only reason for investing. Feels OK to be in but time will tell ...

I have had a holding in this for a while and in fact increased it about 6 months ago. I have been happy with it so far.
I think it does pay a dividend, of around 1.5% according to HL, or 3.14% according to IC
MM

Stockopedia gives ttm dividend of 3.14% and theaic says 3.4%.
Very interesting. Thanks for flagging this up Scorcery.

Sorcery wrote:However IBT (of the post's title) is a UK AIM company that is investable in.

Is IBT an AIM share? I have owned it for over a decade and have done very well out of it, but never knew that.

think it does pay a dividend of around 1.5%

Yahoo finance and the trust website disagree.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IBT.L/ Dividend N/A

The website does have some well known names in it (perhaps my broker started with an alphabetical listing ):
Top 10 Quoted Investments
Horizon Therapeutics,
Acadia Pharmaceuticals,
Vertex Pharmaceuticals,
BioMarin.
PTC Therapeutics,
Gilead Sciences.
BioHaven Pharmaceuticals,
Amgen,
ChemoCentryx,
Alexion.

It may not be an AIM share, at the rate I am getting things wrong, it 's probably got a full listing

IBT Dividend policy changed about 3 years ago and they now pay 4% of the share price which I think is set once a year.

So when you see that the current dividend yield is 3.14% it is because the share price has risen from the share price when
the last annual 4% was set.

I have also held for a number of years and am comfortable with this policy which so far has been successful.

bonrepos wrote:IBT Dividend policy changed about 3 years ago and they now pay 4% of the share price which I think is set once a year.

So when you see that the current dividend yield is 3.14% it is because the share price has risen from the share price when
the last annual 4% was set.

I have also held for a number of years and am comfortable with this policy which so far has been successful.

Yes, and also note that not all biotech shares pay no dividend. Of the top ten holdings cited for IBT, Amgen yields 3% and Gilead yields over 4%.

Yes, it has a full listing.

And, if you're interested in this then you should have a look at Biotech Growth Trust - BIOG.

I'm happy to have been holding both for a few years now - but BIOG has been much more successful as far as share price is concerned.

Laughton wrote:Yes, it has a full listing.

And, if you're interested in this then you should have a look at Biotech Growth Trust - BIOG.

I'm happy to have been holding both for a few years now - but BIOG has been much more successful as far as share price is concerned.

Yes, I hold BIOG as well. And since it does not artificially disgorge 4% of itself every year, I would expect its share price to do better, and it has.

Sadly it is in my taxable account so CGT to pay. IBT is in my ISA.

Sorcery wrote:The word batty is apt, she likes bog snorkelling apparently. Unsure whether that's a summer or winter sport.

Summer.

Back in 2000 I heard of (didn't try) that when someone posted about it to uk.rec.cycling. Records of Usenet are lost (google's fault), but googling finds the lady in question has a page about the event at http://www.myra-simon.com/bike/bog-snork.html .

Anyway given her success in picking vaccines, I wondered what else she did as she works for a venture capitalist company SV Health Investors, there are several venture capital funds she is involved in, which are out of reach for a normal private investor (minimum investment £5m). However IBT (of the post's title) is a UK AIM company that is investable in. She (Kate) is one of the investment managers on it : https://ibtplc.com/about
It's does not pay a dividend but is low PE of about 6 according to Yahoo finance and the price has not run away with itself.

I've held IBT for some years, and (like others in its sector) it's done well. Relatively recently it attracted Foolish comment when the dividend was raised from tiny to reasonably substantial - the highest in the sector.

Uncle
I assume you have seen the investment managers change announced today, any thoughts ?
I have had these for about 3 years and been happy, at least it is more of a reshuffle than a booting out of the old. Hopefully little change will happen.

ralt wrote:Bingham’s big Covid job barred IBT from vaccine gains


https://citywire.co.uk/investment-trust ... ider+Daily

Requires signing up to read. Is there an executive summary you could share here?

The performance of International Biotechnology (IBT) has lagged in the past year in part because it was forced to miss out on soaring vaccine stocks as a result of Kate Bingham’s role as head of the UK vaccine taskforce.

The £295m trust reported a 9.8% increase in net asset value (NAV) for the year to the end of August, significantly behind the 22.8% return from the Nasdaq Biotechnology index. The disparity was caused by the fund precluding companies that were working on a Covid-19 vaccine in order to avoid any perceived conflict of interest arising from Bingham (pictured above) – who is a managing partner at the trust’s fund manager SV Health.

This saw investors miss out on stellar gains in companies like Moderna, which leaped 494% over the period and contributed 12.3% to the index gain.

Trust chairman Jim Horsburgh said the decision not to invest in vaccine companies was ‘to ensure that neither SV nor its clients were seen to benefit from Bingham’s privileged access to information contained in the government contracts with the named vaccine suppliers’.

‘The board is very proud of the outstanding contribution of Bingham in helping to secure a leading supply of vaccines for the UK,’ he said.

As a holder I was mightily unimpressed. Still, as long as she is in the New Years Honours List.

Baldchap
Indeed when I said that I had been happy with these over the last 3 years that was in March, if I had known then what I read a week or two ago about the ban on vaccine investments I would not have said I was happy, in fact I struggle to understand how they could manage the large amount of money for people as they do without disclosing this to the investors at the time, clearly the Dame did a very good job in securing vaccines, without a doubt, but to keep investors in the dark about consequences of this task, very poor form, imho.

Significant drop (5%+) in IBT share price today. I can't find any news that would explain it. Does anyone know why?

Y

yieldhog
I suspect it could have something to do with the incorrect statement of their nav in October which was corrected on 24 November by another RNS ?
Mr Market doesn't usually take kindly to confusion.

If anyone is interested there has been a 7 minute video interviewing the 2 fund managers of IBT put up today on the companies website (under videos).
I found it quite informative.