UCITs Future Wealth Fund, Marks 5 Years, Investing in the Trends Shaping Tomorrow

In August 2021, IDAD launched a fund based on a simple idea: that profound technological, demographic and economic changes would create the investment opportunities of the future. Five years on, that future looks considerably closer.

In August 2021, IDAD launched a fund based on a simple idea: that profound technological, demographic and economic changes would create the investment opportunities of the future. Five years on, that future looks considerably closer.

The Fund was launched with a clear long-term objective: to provide capital growth over the medium term by investing in the industries, technologies and changing behaviours expected to shape the future. Five years on, the investment themes behind the Fund remain as relevant as ever. The MGTS IDAD Future Wealth Fund takes a diversified thematic approach across four key areas: Digital Industry, Healthcare Innovation, New Energy and Online Life, providing underlying exposure to themes including; cloud technology, renewable energy, automation and robotics.

What makes the strategy distinctive is that it is not designed around trying to identify the next single winning company or technology. Instead, the Fund seeks to gain broad exposure to the sectors and innovations driving structural change, using a combination of thematic ETFs as well as some direct holdings. Over the past five years, the investment landscape has changed significantly, from the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure to continuing developments in healthcare, energy and automation. The MGTS IDAD Future Wealth Fund has continued to evolve alongside these changes, while maintaining its focus on the long-term trends that are reshaping how we work, rest and play.

The Fund has delivered strong relative performance over shorter and medium-term periods. Against the IA Flexible Investment sector, the Future Wealth Fund has delivered particularly strong relative performance over the one- and three-year periods, ranking 2nd out of 175 funds over one year and 2nd out of 157 over three years, according to Trustnet. Over the five-year period, the Fund currently ranks 76th out of 142 funds, placing it just in the third quartile. With the Fund reaching its five-year anniversary, the latest performance figures provide an important additional measure of how the strategy has performed through a range of market conditions.

“When we first started developing the Future Wealth Fund back in 2020, we believed we were investing in changes that would play out over the following decade or more. What has surprised me is not so much that those changes have happened, but the extraordinary speed at which they have arrived. Artificial intelligence is perhaps the clearest example: in only a few years it has moved from something largely discussed by technologists to something being embedded into businesses and everyday life around the world.

And I think we are still relatively early. The next stage will increasingly see AI move beyond the computer screen – into personal digital assistants capable of organising large parts of our lives, into autonomous vehicles and, eventually, into increasingly capable robots. It may sound fanciful today, but a future robot could potentially learn how to carry out a task simply by watching a video, travel autonomously to collect the materials it needs and then perform that task itself. Five years of managing the Future Wealth Fund has taught me that we should probably be careful about saying something is ten years away – because increasingly, it might only be three or four.” Tom McGrath, Portfolio Manager of the MGTS IDAD Future Wealth Fund.

Five Years of Performance

Source: FE Analytics – Annual Performance figures up to 25.08.2026

Alicia Sims

Marketing Manager