Minotaur Monthly

The Minotaur Global Opportunities Fund returned +4.7% in July, outperforming the MSCI All Country World Index (AUD) by 1.6%. Since inception 15 months ago, the Fund has now delivered a cumulative return of +33.0%, compared to +24.6% for the benchmark.

Navigating Divergence
Markets rose in July despite signs of policy and geopolitical divergence. Strong US tech earnings continued to anchor sentiment, but elsewhere the picture grew more complicated.

The Fed held rates steady, though a split vote for the first time since 1993 highlighted the growing tension within the FOMC. Chair Powell pushed back against near-term cuts, citing stickier inflation and tariff pressures. Meanwhile, Trump-era reciprocal tariffs made a return. While the US struck deals with the EU, Japan and South Korea, other countries like Brazil and India saw higher levies. A temporary exemption on refined copper added to sharp volatility in commodities markets.

The fund: AI exposure offsetting some idiosyncratic weakness
The Fund’s performance this month was driven by some of our AI-related names with NVIDIA benefiting from record AI capex guidance across multiple US tech majors and SMCI re-rating accordingly. The Aussie small cap names in our portfolio are playing out well – we really only play Aussie stocks where we feel we have a unique insight. This is borne out by both iPerionX, which is benefiting from several salient themes including re-shoring, decarbonisation, and defence, and Artrya, an early-stage Australian medtech company commercialising a suite of AI-driven diagnostic tools for coronary artery disease.

We also saw strong contribution from our long Eli Lilly / short Novo Nordisk pair trade with Novo surprising the market by slashing its 2025 outlook amid GLP-1 saturation concerns and increased competition from compounded alternatives.

On the detractor front, Duolingo suffered from weaker than expected results driven by margin compression and reputational backlash following their AI contractor shift, CD Projekt gave back some gains after a strong June, and Arthur Gallagher was modestly weak post earnings. Nonetheless, we think the fundamentals are intact for these names.

Pushing the Edge: Taurient Developments
This month, we delivered a significant uplift in Taurient’s functionality – spanning research depth, data coverage, and operational resilience.

We extended our Snapshot tool beyond US and Japan to include live ASX filings, with more exchanges coming soon.

We’ve also talked extensively about how we look for a unique edge we can “code up” to deliver concrete insights to underpin our fundamental analysis on companies. One example is our new Flight Tracker for Wizz Air, which scrapes and visualises route-level flight activity. This tool enhances our capacity planning forecasts and feeds directly into our thesis for Wizz Air’s operating leverage recovery. We increased our Wizz Air holding in July.

Taurient's Live Flight Tracker

Behind the scenes, we’ve expanded Taurient’s infrastructure to ten servers across four countries, including dedicated machines for pricing, global data collection, and background processing. The system is now more resilient, geographically redundant, and built to support the growing complexity of our research operations.

We also began ingesting vast datasets that would be impractical for humans to monitor manually. For Cover Corp, one of our top holdings, we’ve collected metadata and live chat data from over 75,000 YouTube streams. This will underpin a continuous monitoring system designed to track audience health, monetisation, and momentum, as if a full-time analyst were assigned to the company 24/7.

Finally, we expanded Taurient’s portfolio analytics to cover rolling exposure, portfolio age, short attribution, fund capacity, and exit-time estimates. These outputs can now be generated on demand through a fully integrated, code-based system, replacing what’s typically a days-long manual process across disconnected tools and sometimes done by a completely external risk team vs having that knowledge in-house.

Not resting on our laurels
We often say that combining deep fundamental research with proprietary AI and software tooling is at the heart of our investment process. This month we were reminded why that matters. But we recognise that maintaining an edge requires work. Just this week a potential investor questioned whether we can maintain our long-term competitive advantage given usage of AI by fund managers is rapidly evolving.

Our answer is simple: not without relentless reinvestment of our time and effort. We don’t assume we’ll stay ahead by chance – we’re building for it, line by line. In July alone, we shipped over 100 improvements across research infrastructure, real-time analytics, global data scraping, risk tooling, and reporting automation, each one designed to sharpen our insight or reduce internal friction. It’s one of the reasons we outline the innovations we’re making in Taurient. As Plutarch says, “No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.”