BGF World Technology D2

Analyst Report
Morningstar's Take
|06/06/2024

by Stephen Welch
Caroline Tall joined BlackRock Technology Opportunities as a comanager on Sept. 22, 2022. This addition does not alter the strategy’s Morningstar Analyst Ratings.

While Tall is new to BlackRock, she isn’t new to technology investing. She spent more than 13 years working at Fidelity Investments as an analyst and portfolio manager specializing in tech. Since late 2017, she ran Fidelity Select Tech Hardware FDCPX before departing the firm early this year for BlackRock. Importantly, the highly regarded Tony Kim continues to lead the strategy with the help of Reid Menge.

 
Veteran leadership plies a distinctive approach mapping out the growing tech-oriented universe on BlackRock Technology Opportunities and Luxembourg-domiciled BGF World Technology, making it an attractive option at the right price.

While Tony Kim’s 11-year tenure managing this strategy lands him in the top quartile of technology Morningstar Category peers, his technological expertise goes well beyond that and is tough to match. He’s spent more than 30 years analyzing tech firms and has developed his own system to organize and monitor the universe. This framework helps Kim standardize firms across industries for easy comparisons. He has assembled a team of seven, including one comanager and a data scientist; each team member is responsible for understanding the entire tech sector.

Kim takes a holistic, distinctive approach within the technology-oriented universe. He targets cutting-edge tech, intriguing business models, and emerging industries. Over his career, he has mapped a proprietary 1,200-plus stock universe that helps the team find compelling growth prospects including traditional global technology companies as well as ones that fall outside the typical classification. With the help of the team’s data scientist, Kim has built out a proprietary software platform that allows the team to easily compare company data across their industries and focus analysts’ time on projections. This system allows the team to dive into specific industries and easily identify top opportunities ranked on various metrics. Kim continues to enhance this framework and is in the process of building out a generative artificial intelligence tool to help the team parse incoming news.

While performance has stumbled recently, the strategy’s long-term record remains solid. Since Kim took over in June 2013 through May 2024, the institutional shares’ 21% annualized return landed in the top third of the category and outpaced the MSCI ACWI/Information Technology benchmark’s 19.2%. In the first five months of 2024, the strategy handily outpaced the index, thanks in part to semiconductor picks such as top holding Nvidia.

Few investors have the skill, experience, and framework that Kim does to keep up with the shifts in the rapidly changing tech sector, making this a solid long-term option.
 
Morningstar Medalist Rating™A skilled leader with a differentiated approach.
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Morningstar Pillars
PeopleAbove Average
ParentAbove Average
ProcessAbove Average
 
Morningstar Medalist RatingMorningstar assigns the Medalist Rating to funds that are qualitatively and quantitatively assessed through manager research and algorithmic processes. The assessment turns on three key “pillars” – People, Process, and Parent – that yield an estimate of how well a fund will perform before fees but after adjusting for risk.
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