In July, the NAV was +7.8% on a total return basis and the share price was +8.6% on a total return basis, while the index was +3.7%. Most of the Data, Software and Platform companies in the portfolio reported results in July. They all met or exceeded expectations, with one exception – Rightmove. Here revenues were marginally below consensus and revenue growth next year is also expected to fall below forecast, 7% rather than 8%. Yet Rightmove shares were up on the day of the results and 6% for the month, and are now up 15% from their lows of May. Considering why the shares rallied, despite the forecast miss, is instructive. We believe the reasons are encouraging, not just for Rightmove's future prospects, but, by extrapolation, for our other major Data, Software and Platform holdings too. The cause of the slowdown at Rightmove is macro-economic. Specifically, new home developments in the UK are at 'historically low levels', with conditions for housebuilders worse than at any time since the Global Financial Crisis, according to Rightmove's CEO. But while it would be helpful for Rightmove if the housing market were more buoyant, the fluctuations of UK real estate are not central to our case for holding the equity. Rather, it is the vibrancy and competitiveness of Rightmove's platform that really matters. Rightmove's shares have fallen over the last 12 months not because of a cyclical slowdown, but because investors are apprehensive about disintermediation of its platform. There is an existential concern – will LLMs (large language models) take eyeballs and inventory away from it? The results at the end of July demonstrate this existential concern is unwarranted – at least not yet. There are two perspectives that encouraged investors and us. First, engagement on Rightmove's platform seems to be increasing and the company reports no change in consumer behaviour. House-buyers or renters are as loyal as ever to the site. In June 2026, 90% of the time spent on a real estate portal was spent on Rightmove, up from 85% last year. In addition, 90% of the traffic is organic, coming directly to Rightmove's site or app, rather than directed. Indeed, less than 0.5% of Rightmove's traffic is directed from LLMs, a figure unchanged over the last year. Meanwhile, agent numbers grew again and agent retention rates are at their highest for a decade. This looks like an exceptionally healthy platform, where consumers and agents and their inventory meet to mutual benefit. But even more encouraging is how Rightmove is capitalising on this level of engagement. When consumers, agents and housing inventory meet on a digital platform, something happens. Data is created. And this is data that is not accessible to other portals or LLMs, which do not enjoy the same levels of engagement. Rightmove has found new ways to extract value from this data, often deploying the same AI tools that are, according to the bears, supposed to undermine its platform. For instance, Rightmove is trialing its own 'Ask Rightmove' conversational search agent – similar in purpose to ChatGPT. To June 2026, six million Rightmove customers have had access to the service. Those that use it spend 40% more time on Rightmove's site than others, they save double the number of properties for review and, crucially, are twice as likely to send a lead to an estate agent than before. Rightmove already sends a billion alerts to UK consumers annually, and this service is likely to mean these alerts will be even more relevant, because they will have been taught by monitoring consumers' individual preferences, as specified on 'Ask Rightmove'. Elsewhere, Rightmove owns other data assets unavailable to an LLM or a start-up. For instance, Rightmove Plus is a business intelligence platform provided to estate agents. In 2025, 28 million sessions were logged on the service, but Rightmove believes these users only derive a fraction of the utility from the data and tools available to them. Hence the company has launched Rightmove Plus AI-Assistant, which the company believes will help agents derive even more value from its proprietary data and insights. We think investors were right to look through any cyclical pressure on the UK housing market and focus instead of the demonstrable strengthening of Rightmove's platform – because the latter could drive revenue and profit growth for years to come. It's that same possibility – the possibility that incumbent platforms or data providers are beneficiaries of AI-technology, not losers – that lifted Sage's share price by 19% in July, as the company revealed accelerating revenue growth, driven, in part, by its own AI tools, trained on Sage's proprietary business data. Tools that, for instance, delivered 75 million insights to its customers using its cloud platform last year, or its Accounts Payable Agent, which saved clients five million hours. Sage's CEO, Steve Hare, says 'Sage is native AI'. That may be an exaggeration, but if he's right about the direction of travel, the business has a long growth runway in our view. LSEG's interim results also beat forecasts and CEO David Schwimmer asserted the following in his presentation: 'A frontier AI company is not a data provider... In fact, it is now well understood that for an AI company to generate value for enterprise customers, it actually needs a high quality provider of data.' Schwimmer believes the recent results demonstrate that LSEG is such a high quality data provider that the frontier AI models need LSEG much more than LSEG needs any one of those models individually. We agree. These updates increase our confidence that investors have become too cautious about the London-listed Data companies we own, and that there is the prospect both for meaningful business growth to come and for a non-trivial rerating of their depressed shares. Accordingly, in July we initiated two new holdings – so far in very small size. We regard both companies as world class businesses, in wholly separate industries, one an industrial engineer, the other an important piece of global capital market infrastructure, both with an opportunity to utilise the proprietary data they generate during the course of their normal operations to derive new value for existing customers. As David Schwimmer says, 'Data is more important than ever... in an AI world.' Finding underappreciated or underexploited caches of data in the UK stock market may prove to be a fruitful source of value-creating investment ideas. The top three absolute contributors to the Company's performance in July were Sage, RELX and Experian, and the top three absolute detractors were Celtic, Games Workshop and Manchester United.
