Time to invest in robotics?

The London-based, Swiss-born manager of the RoboCap UCITS Fund, talks to Opalesque about investing in the robotics revolution.

The fund launched in January 2016 and focuses on global robotics and automation listed equities. It is up 23.64% YTD and up 40.74% since inception. The strategy manages more than $70m.

Opalesque: How do you define robotics?

Jonathan Cohen: We define a robot as any machine which is controlled by a microprocessor, which means that it can be programmed and reprogrammed. We would include self-driving cars, drones, industrial robots, 3D printing, surgical robots, exoskeletons, robots for logistics, artificial intelligence, key components on the software side and on the hardware side, so the whole value chain.

Opalesque: It's not only machines, it's also software, hardware, artificial intelligence.

Jonathan Cohen: Yes, so a machine can recognize its environments, it needs a software for vision recognition. Once it has recognized the objects, it can interact with it, then you can have some decision making. For example, a self-driving car needs to recognize trees or humans crossing the road, and then incorporate the information to make decisions.

Opalesque: So what do you invest in?

Jonathan Cohen: We invest into pure-play robotics and automation listed stocks. Within this theme, we look at companies with at least 40% of sales related to the theme for the next two-three years, which are liquid enough so they tend to be market caps over $200 million - I think the smallest market cap we have in the portfolio is $400 million.

Our investment universe globally includes the US, which is about half of the universe, Japan is about a quarter,......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.