Hi Charles,
Much appreciated, it’s been a challenging year but as you say the outperformance of the last 3-months has been welcome.
The Firetrail Australian Small Companies Fund, Active ETF (FSML) was officially listed on the ASX in mid-November 2024. Prior to this date, the fund operated under the name “Firetrail Australian Small Companies Fund” and was available as an unlisted fund and via the mFund service (which is being wound down between now and May 2026 – hence a lot of these funds are moving to an ETF structure). The transition to an active ETF structure allowed for its quotation on the ASX under the ticker code FSML.
- We think Firetrail is a solid manager enjoying decent performance accross some of their funds, with their small cap strategy being one of them. The FSML ETF is performing strongly as the small caps enjoy a resurgence. In the unlisted small cap fund space, we think the Regal Small Companies Fund is very good, however it is a wholesale only product and has a 100k min invetsment).
We still like GQQ around $1.70 for the same reasons we bought the stock in August, but the market is going against their current defensive positioning, leading to material underperformance accross their stratgies, and we expect further outflows. We have a 4% target weighting and have no plans to increase this.
