Hi Kenneth,
We’re sorry that your question wasn’t answered last week, it came through after the midday cut-off on Friday, AEST.
WAM Global (WGB) delivered a difficult first half, with its investment portfolio underperforming by ~10%, which is significant. As you highlight, the financials make for equally uncomfortable reading. The after-tax loss of $11.1m compares to a profit of $74.9m in HY2025.
Regarding the dividend, on the surface, maintaining and growing a dividend during a period of meaningful underperformance and operating losses looks like a capital management decision designed to keep investors onside – but it does raise legitimate questions about sustainability if performance doesn’t improve in the second half.
As an aside, we don’t like how WAM reports performance in their updates. They don’t provide a clear table setting out portfolio returns relative to benchmarks to allow for easy comparison. Looking longer term, WGB has delivered annual (pre-fee) returns of 8.3% pa since inception in 2018, which compares to their benchmarks return of 13% pa.
So, the recent underperformance is not new – its a consistent trend. For comparison, the Market Matters International Equities Portfolio has done over 19% pa since it was launched on the website in 2019. It became open for investment in June of 2025, and has returned 16.5% since then – which is over 10% ahead of benchmark. Noting, this also includes a very weak month in February, where the portfolio was down ~9%. More info can be found here for those interested.
