Allianz Technology Trust
Why is this fund on our radar?
Allianz Technology Trust (Ticker: ATT) offers a way to invest in the rapidly changing and evolving technology ecosystem with a specialist team at the helm. Being based in San Francisco, Mike Seidenberg and his co-managers have a ring-side seat at the heart of the information technology industry, Silicon Valley. Mike has over three decades of experience watching new technologies arrive and grow, and has lived through plenty of ups and downs in the tech industry along the way. In ATT, he aims to capture the transformative power of trends like artificial intelligence (AI), and whatever comes next, while remaining diversified and adapting the portfolio as opportunities shift.
In our view, this is an appealing approach at a time where AI has arrived and investors are working out the consequences for a whole range of industries. The well-known giants could still turn out to be relative losers from the new technology, or at least take a back seat for a while, but either way, it’s a difficult call for individual investors, which is where Mike’s experience comes in. While he holds some of the big names, he has tended to invest a lot in the smaller, mid-cap companies, which might be less well-known but can deliver higher returns.
Skip to Our VerdictPerformance
The technology sector has been the driving force behind world stock markets over the past decade and has delivered exceptional returns. E-commerce and social media, enterprise software and cloud-based services, cybersecurity and fintech have all been among the themes to have delivered strong returns at times. Since 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, AI has given tech a new impetus, with hardware suppliers of semiconductors and memory the biggest winners so far. Over ten years, the share price of a passive investment tracking the tech market has risen 6.8 times. ATT has done even better, the shares up 8.1 times. Both of these returns are many times better than the 2.1 times return delivered by a broad index measuring global shares as a whole.
ATT has done better than a passive investment in technology overall, and this has come in specific periods. For example, in 2020 its net asset value (which measures the performance of its investments rather than ATT’s own share price) rose 75% compared to 41% for the index. Some of these periods are when mid-sized businesses have outperformed, and Mike’s focus on finding the best opportunities there has paid off. In the 2022-2024 period, a handful of large companies were responsible for a disproportionate amount of performance, with Nvidia a standout even amongst those. This period saw ATT behind the index overall. However, in 2025 and in 2026 to the time of writing, the trust has delivered significant outperformance again. We think this reflects a changing market structure. Now that the first gains have been made in AI-related hardware, the industry is more mature and investors are trying to work out what the next step is and which businesses are winners and losers. In this sort of environment, we think an active approach is more attractive and this has been reflected in recent returns.
Calendar year returns
Source: Morningstar, 2026 as of 18/08/2026
Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results
Portfolio
Diversity is an important feature of ATT’s portfolio. Mike always aims to be exposed to a variety of themes and industries rather than putting all his eggs in one basket. We think this is particularly important in the technology industry given it is prone to disruption and sudden changes in the fortunes of individual companies or technologies. The chart below shows how the team broke down their portfolio as of the end of the last financial year. AI was the largest theme, followed by robotics, cybersecurity and web 3.0 (a term describing the next gen of internet technology). Mike and his team are constantly reassessing the outlook for their holdings and potential new holdings, and these allocations change dynamically over time depending on where the managers see the best growth opportunities, always taking into consideration the valuation of the companies and whether they are too expensive.
Thematic exposure
Source: Allianz
Entering 2026, Mike had less invested in the three largest technology companies in the world than the passive funds, and in fact had less in six of the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’, the megacap tech stocks which had been driving markets. He also had nothing in Amazon for the first time in decades. We think this is a good example of how active his approach is and how different ATT can be from a passive fund. This decision has helped the trust to do better than the passive funds in 2026. Mike had also sold a lot of his software exposure, correctly estimating that AI would lead to problems for those companies as investors considered whether their business models would be disrupted by AI. Again, this is active investing working as it ideally should, and we think shows the sort of call a sector specialist is better placed to make over a generalist equity investor.
Our Verdict
We think an active approach to investing in technology looks well-suited for an environment in which the first surge in AI companies has started to peter out and investors are looking for the next opportunities, or the next companies to be disrupted. Mike is likely to be able to react far quicker than a private investor, and has excellent access to the leading tech firms and rising stars, giving him insight into how the sector is evolving.
AI seems to offer the potential for massive disruption across the stock market, including within the tech sector itself, with room for new markets and technologies to develop which could see technology companies continue to deliver outstanding returns. For this reason, we think that technology companies are likely to perform well over the next five- and ten-year periods, and that this backdrop is more likely to reward an active approach to investing over a passive one.Bottom of Form
In our view, ATT is appealing due to the specialist team of managers, who have great access to the heart of the action, plenty of experience and a good track record. As an investment trust, there is also value in ATT’s own shares to consider and the discount they trade on to the net asset value. ATT is trading on a discount at the time of writing, which means the underlying portfolio can be bought for less than the components could be bought directly. This situation is liable to change, though, so investors need to get comfortable with the share price discount or premium when they are considering investing.
Key Risks
- Discount could widen, leading to share price losing more than portfolio value
- As a sector specialist fund brings specific risk which could lead to volatile price behaviour
- Technology has suffered multi-year drawdowns in the past and could again
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