July: The gaming market grew slightly during the quarter

The market and investors are now confused, is the growth of the global economies about to weaken? Are we headed for new lockdowns due to the Delta version of COVID? What is happening to inflation, is it here to stay? However, the companies continue to deliver and a large part of the companies that reported Q2 results have beaten their own and the market's estimates.

As for the gaming market, we have really only seen two results, Ubisoft which came in weak as they had no new titles during the quarter and Microsoft which had problems getting component deliveries for its new Xbox. However, we generally believe that the gaming market grew slightly during the quarter, which is a more positive view than that of the companies who expected a small decrease.

On the hardware side, we've seen strong results from AMD and Logitech, indicating continued strong demand for gaming. However, we believe that the number of players and hours may be somewhat weaker than last year when these key figures were very positively affected by many countries shutting down their economies. Many of our holdings report in early August. We believe in good reports but are a bit worried about the number of new games released in the second half of the year which could make the market very tough.

The fund returned -1.0% in July and is now up 11.3% this year with a rolling 12 month Sharpe ratio of 2.5.