Fidelity Japan Trust

Outperformance driven by skilled stock selection

3 March 2021

Fidelity Japan Trust (FJV) targets long-term capital growth, via investment in Japanese companies. Manager Nicholas Price adopts a bottom-up stock -picking approach aimed at identifying, ahead of other investors, the next generation of great growth companies in Japan. He believes the Japanese market offers many investment opportunities, especially among mid- and small-cap companies that are often not covered by other analysts. The trust has performed strongly in absolute and relative terms since the Q120 sell-off and has outperformed its index, the TOPIX, and the average of its peers, over one, three, five and 10 years. MORE »

Rewarding investors well in challenging times

26 August 2020

Fidelity Japan Trust (FJV) targets long-term capital growth by investing in Japanese companies. Manager Nicholas Price believes the Q120 market sell-off created attractive opportunities to invest in companies that have been overlooked, but which will emerge from the pandemic with greater market share and superior long-term growth prospects. FJV is overweight in technology and IT-related sectors, where the manager expects selected companies will continue to benefit from 5G and coronavirus-driven demand for tech products and related services. The trust has performed strongly in absolute and relative terms in recent months and has outperformed its index, and the UK market, over most periods. MORE »

Active approach aims to ‘find new winners’

24 April 2020

Fidelity Japan Trust (FJV) manager Nicholas Price, in response to the COVID-19-driven global market sell-off, is committed to ‘finding the new winners’. The trust has a significant weighting to technology-enabled sectors, where Japan offers many world-leading companies in areas such as factory automation, precision instruments and semiconductors. However, the manager is also taking another look at oversold services companies and more traditional areas such as retailing and leisure, where extremely depressed valuations may offer a mid- to long-term opportunity. MORE »

Multi-cap portfolio with strong performance record

7 November 2019

Fidelity Japan Trust (FJV) has performed particularly strongly versus its reference index so far in 2019, after a sharp decline in Q418. It has also done significantly better than the main Japanese index over both shorter and longer periods, as well as outperforming its peer group over one, three and five years to 31 October. Manager Nicholas Price, backed up by a large analyst team, focuses on unearthing attractive investment opportunities among less well-researched areas of the Japanese market, and has recently been finding compelling ideas in technology-related sectors such as semiconductors, where he sees good medium-term growth prospects and attractive valuations. MORE »

Unearthing attractively valued growth in Japan

23 April 2019

Fidelity Japan Trust (FJV) has recovered well in NAV terms from the global equity sell-off in the last quarter of 2018, which negatively affected its FY18 performance. Manager Nicholas Price says that the sharp de-rating of Japanese equities (which has only partly reversed as share prices have rebounded) means he is able to find many attractive companies trading at unwarranted discounts. The Japanese equity market is extremely under-researched compared with other major developed markets, and the input from Fidelity’s large, locally based analyst team, together with Price’s own research, makes FJV well-placed to capitalise on investment opportunities that the majority of (particularly overseas) investors may have overlooked. FJV’s multi-cap portfolio continues to have a natural bias towards smaller and mid-cap stocks, with Price seeking reasonably priced companies that have high returns on equity and a solid three- to five-year growth outlook. MORE »

Established, on-the-ground expertise in Japan

18 September 2018

Fidelity Japan Trust (FJV) has a bottom-up, research-intensive investment process, a flexible approach to gearing and a focus on stocks across the market cap spectrum that offer growth at a reasonable price (GARP). Lead manager, Nicholas Price, has just notched up three years in charge, but has been with Fidelity in Japan for 25 years, first as part of the well-resourced analyst team and later as a portfolio manager across a range of mandates. FJV was known as Fidelity Japanese Values until May 2018, but changed its name as one of a number of administrative changes designed to align with the trust’s all-cap, growth-focused strategy. Short- and longer-term performance have been strong, both in absolute terms and relative to indices; the discount widened over the summer while NAV performance remained positive, supporting near-term re-rating potential. MORE »