Since 2007 I have been a non-exec director of RCM Technology Trust (RTT.L). Yesterday we held our AGM. AGM’s are ‘interesting’ as they are attended by retail investors. The institutional investors which form the bulk of our shareholders stay away; always preferring 1-2-1 sessions instead. RCM is a publicly-quoted technology investment trust. The global fund has investments exceeding $3b. The UK bit has seen its NAV increase by 16.9% since our year end of 30th Nov 12 to date against an increase of 10.5% in our benchmark Dow Jones World Technology Index. Not a bad performance even by Holway’s standards! The fund invests only in liquid mid to large cap stocks. Generally with a min $1b market value.
RCM has a fund manager (Walter Price) and a whole team of analysts. I should point out that I am not involved in any stock picking. But I do have my say on general trends.
Walter Price gave a fascinating presentation to shareholders on the trends in technology with investment preferred in four general themes:
Using the internet to develop new markets– eg Google, eBay, Visa
Cost savings from data centre and application consolidation eg Salesforce.com, Amazon
Updated communications infrastructure required by those large data centres and by mobile employees in the Enterprise eg Cisco, Aruba
‘Big problems create big markets’ eg Tesla (electric cars), Cree (LED technology)
One of the many interesting charts Walter presented was how, over time, advertising spend migrated to where consumers spent their entertainment time. In 2008 we spent 43.2% of that 
time on TV which attracted 40.6% of ad spend. Sounds obvious!
But in 2008 we spent 23% of that time on the internet which attracted only 13% of ad spend. Fast forward to 2011 and ad spend on the internet had increased to 19% and is close to parity now.
The converse applies to Newspapers and Magazines as time spent has declined as has ad spend in those media.
What is really interesting is time spent on mobile has doubled from 5% to 10% in 2011 and much higher than that in 2013. But ad spend on mobile is just 1% - albeit increasing at a phenomenal rate. If you believe the thesis, then mobile, in time, will attract an ad spend = to the time spent on it. Which in turn says that those who crack mobile advertising will garner rich rewards.
But whereas advertising in newspapers could progress to TV and onto the internet, mobile is a much more difficult nut to crack. In this regard, Google’s acquisition of Youtube now looks inspired. Youtube has ported to mobile extremely well and the brief ad before the video has been accepted by consumers.
Facebook faces perhaps the biggest challenge. Its targeted ads on a standard webpage really don’t work on the small screen. But Facebook now gets most of its views via smartphones so it has been changing fast. Tonight we might all learn the latest in this move. Will Facebook launch its own smartphone? Will, as the FT suggests, we all be underwhelmed? Tune in tomorrow to find out.