Equities or shares will inevitably feature in Minerva Money Management but these will not be any old equities. We carefully select shares for our fund which have particular attributes.
- Market dominant in their specialist sectors.
- Technology companies in their own right or technologically led.
- Bold and cutting edge approach.
- Not limited to one sector or speciality.
- Typically founded by exponential entrepreneurs.
- Low costs especially because of automation.
- Customers do the bulk of the work.
- Pioneering, experimental and visionary.
- Practise constant and never ending improvement.
- Quasi fund managers.
So the types of shares that make it into Minerva Money Management are companies like Facebook, Alphabet (Google) and Amazon. Such companies are virtually investment funds in their own right in that they each have a number of subsidiary companies not confined to one specialist sector. Alphabet along has about 200 subsidiary companies. So even though investors in our fund are investing in one company they are indirectly investing in many companies and into a multitude of sectors. This means that your level of investment risk is greatly diversified and as a consequence reduced.
These companies have largely succeeded in getting their customers to do the bulk of the work whether it be placing an order on Amazon, posting in Facebook or designing an advert on Google Adwords. They merely provide the technological infrastructure or back end.
As for automation all 3 companies are in a world of their own. It is estimates that Google has 900,000 servers compared to just 72,000 employees. That’s a ratio of 12.5 servers to every 1 employee! An impressive statistic and proof that Google is not only a highly automated company but also in effect a robotics company.
We are all familiar with Amazon’s amazingly visionary ways of delivering products to their customers with the proposed use of drones and airships even.
Facebook is following Google’s successful path in generating huge advertising revenues especially since it now has over 2 billion users! A truly staggering statistic.
Turnover per employee at Google is $600,000 a year. At Facebook turnover is even greater per head of staff at $1 million per annum. These are astonishing figures.
All three companies appear to be unstoppable currently. The profitability of Alphabet and Facebook in particular is amazing. Only time will tell whether or not they will continue to dominant the globe. You can rest assured we will be keeping a close eye on all three of these companies in the meantime.
Tony Byrne
Managing Director
Minerva Money Management
