Bellevue Healthcare Trust Factsheet August 2022

Welcome to our August arrogations. The more positive, stock-driven dynamic of recent weeks continued well into August; with wider sentiment buoyed by a ‘better than feared’ outcome from Q2 22 reporting and rare flashes of common sense briefly uttered by the Fed.

Grandiloquently, this was much as expected. We have been humbled by the unpredictability of the wider market’s behaviour many times in the past ten months. However, the summer weeks offered a rare period of clarity (inevitability?), underpinned by relative estimates momentum. The Trust fared well in this period as a consequence, but our attention quickly moved on to what might happen next.

The wider macro-economic picture remains worrisome; doubly so in Europe and triply so in the UK where inflation, economic stagnation and a lack of coherent governance combine to confidently predict that the worst is yet to come. Thank goodness our investment focus lies elsewhere. The Fed duly did its best to remind everyone that no bullets would be left unfired, even if they cannot hit a barn door. Macro rules the roost once more…

Amidst this unceasing turmoil, Healthcare (and dollar assets) should remain a brighter spot, but relative outperformance is no guarantee of absolute returns and investor lassitude may yet prompt a flight back to the illusory safety of mega-cap pharma, despite recent reminders of its fallibility. Traversing the second half of the year will, like H1, be hard yards.