The Portfolio has followed and complied with its policy objective.

We witnessed a tempering of investor sentiment in the last quarter of 2024. The US elections created a level of policy uncertainty from the world's largest economy. We saw 50bps in rate cuts from both the US Federal reserve and the European Central Bank, and 25bps from the Bank of England, which should have been supportive to equity markets. However, the stickiness in inflation readings resulted in markets reducing their expectations for further cuts.

Long dated bond yields rose across all major economies (with the exception of China), creating an unusual disconnect between policy rates and longer dated market yields. Higher US yields, and expectations of protectionist economic policies from the incoming Trump administration resulted in the USD appreciating 7.6% against its trade weighted basket.

The price of copper on the other hand, which is often seen as a gauge of global economic strength, fell 10.7%, driven in part due to ongoing growth concerns in China. Amidst all this movement, the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) ZAR increased by 8.45% and the Benguela Global 27four Feeder Fund increased by 7.77% on a gross basis, thus resulting in a 0.68% underperformance of the Fund for the quarter.

On a full year basis, the ACWI returned 21.25% in rands, and the Fund returned 13.82%, gross of fees. As noted in prior commentaries, this underperformance is largely attributable to the Fund's cautious positioning to high growth tech stocks that have seen their share prices rally on exuberance around AI and related themes over the year.

Whilst we recognize these technologies as transformative, and in many cases, we are bullish on earnings outlooks for these stocks, our valuation discipline has kept us underweight some large stocks such as Nvidia, Broadcom and Tesla.

In the fourth quarter, a 54% rally in Tesla, due to the CEOs proximity to the US president elect, alone resulted in half of the Fund's relative underperformance over the period. We continue to believe that gains cannot continue to be concentrated in a few large technology companies, nor can they be driven in large part by valuation multiple expansion.

We remain selective in our exposure to this group of companies, holding to our quality and valuation philosophy. Below are the quarterly asset allocation changes: