SOI: Quiet Repositioning in an Asian Income Fund

SOI has drifted 8.4% lower over the past month and 1.7% over the past week, closing at 425.5p, yet the borrow market shows no sign of conviction from short sellers. That tension, a meaningful price slide with almost no short-side pressure, is the most interesting thing about this fund right now.

The lending picture is as loose as it gets. Availability sits at 640%, meaning roughly six shares remain available to borrow for every one already lent out. That is close to the tightest the borrow pool has been over the past year from the perspective of shorts, but even the 52-week peak utilization of only 22.3% suggests this has never been a heavily contested short. Cost to borrow has eased 25% over the week to 0.68%, a low figure by any measure and down from a high of 1.45% in early September. The lending data tells a story of near-total disinterest from the short side: borrowing costs are cheap, supply is abundant, and nobody is rushing in.

The Street offers little additional signal. The only analyst record is a single buy rating dating to January 2021, more than five years old, and has no bearing on current conditions. Valuation multiples from the ORTEX data are similarly stale. The ORTEX short score of 34.4 is moderate and has held in a tight band of 34 to 36 over the past two weeks, reflecting the absence of any directional short-side conviction. With no fresh analyst commentary and no live valuation benchmarks, the fund trades largely on sentiment toward Asian equities rather than stock-specific catalysts.

The ownership picture is more informative. The fund is dominated by UK wealth managers, with Rathbones holding 12.3% and Evelyn Partners 11.0%, both having trimmed positions in their most recent disclosed period. Evelyn cut by 1.86 million shares and Rathbones by 1.1 million, suggesting systematic reduction rather than isolated selling. Smaller wealth managers including Hargreaves Lansdown Asset Management, Quilter Cheviot, and JM Finn sit on the other side with modest builds. The net effect is a register of 80 institutional holders where the two largest are gently reducing and mid-tier names are picking up the slack, a pattern consistent with portfolio rebalancing rather than a fundamental reassessment.

Director buying has been the one consistent supportive signal, though the most recent trade is now five months old. Director Shaun Lacey purchased 2,000 shares at 425p in late May 2026. Before that, director Simon Davis made three separate open-market purchases between January and March 2025 at prices ranging from 271p to 328p, all well below where the fund trades now. Nick Winsor bought 20,000 shares at 277.5p in January 2025. The insider data is rated stale at 151 days, and none of these trades are recent enough to carry fresh conviction, but the direction has been uniformly positive across multiple directors over an extended period.

The earnings record offers one constructive note. The fund's last four events produced positive one-day moves in three of the four cases, including a 4.4% gain on the day of the July 2026 release and 1.1% in May. The exception was a small 1.2% fall in November 2025. No next earnings event is currently scheduled in the data.

The key variable to watch is whether the sustained price softness, now an 8.4% decline over one month, begins to attract more meaningful selling pressure from the fund's large wealth-manager holders, or whether the current director-buying precedent and the yield level are sufficient to stabilise demand.