While AI-related shares have continued to dominate market returns, Adam Karr from out offshore partner , Orbis, explains why the Global Equity Fund is focused on identifying businesses that can use AI to strengthen their competitive positions rather than simply benefit from the theme. He reflects on where Orbis continues to find opportunities that the market may be overlooking.
In the first half of 2026, the Orbis Global Equity Fund outperformed the MSCI All Country World Index (the Index) by approximately 7% net of fees. But we did not earn it by sitting still. Market breadth was among the narrowest on record: In April and May, only one in four stocks in the Index outperformed it. When three out of four stocks in the market are hay, finding the needles is harder and more valuable. Every position must earn its keep.
The biggest winners have been concentrated in artificial intelligence (AI). But not all AI exposure is equal. We frame ours in four groups. The first is the "Core": direct exposure through companies like Samsung Electronics, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and SK Square. The second is "Enablers": the businesses providing the power, materials and real estate that hyperscalers need to operate. The third is AI "Powered": companies where AI accelerates an already compelling model, like Alphabet. The fourth is the "Overlooked": resilient businesses the market has mispriced as AI casualties. The first three are widely understood. The fourth is where we believe the market is most wrong, and where we are hunting.
Looking where others are not
Take insurance brokerage. Brown & Brown and Ryan Specialty are brokers: They sit between companies and insurers, matching clients to the right coverage and placing it for a fee, without carrying the risk themselves. Both are priced as AI casualties. Two fears weigh on the stocks: a softening pricing cycle and AI disintermediation. The pricing cycle is already in the price. On AI, we disagree.
AI may automate commodity cover like personal auto, but that is under 5% of Brown & Brown's book. The rest is commercial and speciality insurance, where the broker exercises judgement and answers for a denied claim. It is a people business, and Brown & Brown has spent more than 80 years serving mid-sized companies that lack in-house insurance expertise.
Ryan Specialty makes the case from the other end of the market: a leading specialist in excess and surplus, the part of insurance built for complex, hard-to-place and emerging risk. That market is structurally expanding, and we view Ryan as its most capable navigator.
The pattern holds across the Overlooked. We are not buying businesses AI leaves alone. We are buying businesses that put AI to work. Scaled brokers with proprietary data are sharpened by it, not replaced.
The same logic reaches well beyond insurance. In any industry, the dividing line is rarely whether a company adopts new technology. It is how. We have seen this before.
When electric motors arrived in factories at the turn of the last century, most owners did the obvious thing: They ripped out the central steam engine and dropped in an electric motor. Productivity improved modestly. Nothing fundamental changed.
The real gains came later. Manufacturers realised they no longer needed to organise the factory around the power source. Smaller motors could be distributed to individual machines, and the floor redesigned around workflow rather than around the engine room. That redesign was where the value was created, not the motor itself.
When technology reshapes the business model
We think about AI through the same lens. Most early corporate AI adoption is a motor swap: existing workflows, existing structures, existing assumptions, with AI bolted on. The companies that compound the most value are those willing to redesign the floor. This is a question I ask of every management team I invest behind. QXO is doing exactly that. As it consolidates the prosaic, low-tech business of building-products distribution, it is rebuilding the operating model itself, from pricing and procurement to inventory and branch data, rather than bolting technology onto the old way of working.
We apply the same standard to ourselves. We have wired over two decades of internal research into AI, making the firm's accumulated knowledge searchable for every analyst. It's valuable, but a motor swap. The deeper ambition is improving our decision-making. We are turning years of analyst decisions and investment reasoning into a dataset we can learn from, identifying where our research engine adds the most value and where our reasoning has led us astray. The goal is not to replace our stockpickers' judgement. It is to raise the ceiling on what they can do. We are in the early stages. We are adapting how we work, not our principles. In time, we believe it can make us better stewards of your capital.
Our founder, Allan W B Gray, had a phrase many of us still live by: "Strong convictions, loosely held." It means conviction grounded in evidence over emotion, and adapting your view when the facts change.
The owners who won the electrical age were not those who believed most strongly in electricity, but those who held their old assumptions loosely enough to rebuild around a new reality. The same holds true today. Geopolitical realignment, shifting trade and generational technology are all in motion at once. And we do not pretend to know how they resolve. The job is not to predict. It is to build a portfolio that benefits more from being right than it suffers from being wrong.
I am encouraged by our performance this year. But it is too early to celebrate. The environment will keep testing us. What I cannot know is what markets will do; they rarely co-operate with forecasts. What I do know: Our own money is invested alongside yours.
We will continue to act with discipline, independence and patience. Strong convictions, loosely held.
In the last quarter, we initiated a position in Booking Holdings, a US-based online travel and accommodation booking company, and reduced our positions in SK Square and Samsung Electronics into relative share price strength.