The Minotaur Global Opportunities Fund rose 1.0% in January, continuing our run of positive monthly returns. Three interlinking developments dominated market movements this month:

1. Welcome to the age of Trump 2.0
2. How many ways can the US hate on China?
3. Did China just school the US with DeepSeek?

In the two weeks since Trump moved back into the Oval Office, it’s been volatility galore. Welcome back to the days of policy shifts being rolled out in late night social-media posts and sectors being whipsawed by off-the-cuff comments. Take wind-power stocks, for instance, which slumped after Trump announced no new wind farms would be built. Or defence stocks, which rose after Trump said NATO nations should spend 5% of economic output on defence - more than double the current target. Meanwhile Trump and his wife, Melania, launched meme coins after making it clear that crypto was a policy priority. And then, Trump delivered a huge “Psych!” (at least for a month) following threats of tariffs on Mexico and Canada - although China is still going ahead. This saw currency and equity markets quiver in fear. In short, Trump is definitely back.

Then on China - how does the US hate thee? Let me count the ways… The US started the month blacklisting gaming company Tencent and Tesla battery supplier CATL for alleged links to China’s military. Then more regulations were planned to stop advanced chips made by TSMC and others from flowing to China. And in separate measures, dozens of Chinese mining, solar and textile companies were added to a list of those banned from exporting to the US due to alleged forced labor practices. Meanwhile, every tech bro from Elon Musk to Larry Ellison is considering acquiring TikTok as a means of fending off its controversial ban in the US. Of course, the US may have a point with all this distrust with the US Treasury Department saying that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had breached its network, accessing some unclassified documents.

Then, just when you thought the US couldn’t hate on China more, a Chinese AI startup launched its AI assistant, DeepSeek, and to much fanfare at that. It zoomed to #1 on the App Store and had people raving about it, saying it compares favourably to ChatGPT and was developed for way less. We had a lot to say about that (which you can check out here and here), but basically, our view is that the fears which led to a downturn in AI-related stocks were overblown. That’s because, typically, when a technology gets cheaper, you see usage and demand for that technology explode.

So, how did the Minotaur Fund fare in the face of all that? Perhaps surprisingly to some, there was a dispersion of tech-related winners and losers during the month. Meta was our best performer and our second best performer was a little known stock called iCAD, which uses AI for breast cancer detection. On the losing side, our AI-related/semiconductor names got thrown around with the DeepSeek revelations, but we used that as a buying opportunity. Meanwhile, our European names (CD Projekt, Prysmian, and Commerzbank) did well. In the midst of all the above, the Euro Stoxx 600 rose 6.6% in January - its biggest monthly gain in two years.

We would have done better this month had we not had a sizeable position in iPerionX, a company which recycles titanium in a much more sustainable way than current methods. It was off 23%, costing us a couple of percentage points of performance. But by the same token it was up 24% in December and was our biggest contributor. As Heraclitus says, “No one that encounters prosperity does not also encounter danger”. What matters is that we maintain high conviction on the company and are comfortable with it here as we believe it to be markedly undervalued. That’s what investing is all about, after all.