In 1997, Jeff Sprecher of the US, who had spent years developing power plants, decided to provide transparent pricing to the US power market. Well before electronic trading of financial securities became the norm, Sprecher paid US$1 for a tech start-up so he could build a web-based trading platform.

For three years, Sprecher and his team met oil, natural-gas and power companies to learn what people sought in a trading platform. Some of the innovations that resulted included pre-trade credit limits, counterparty credit filters and electronic trade confirmations - novelties taken for granted now. By 2000, the trading platform was set for launch. Sprecher renamed the shell company Intercontinental Exchange to highlight the trading platform's ability to cross oceans, let alone borders.

In 2001, the International Petroleum Exchange of London wanted to evolve from floor to electronic trading. At the time, the exchange was a regional one that offered oil futures contracts and had less than 25% share of the global oil futures market. Intercontinental Exchange, which promotes itself as ICE, saw an opportunity to branch into energy futures and clearing and purchased the exchange. Thanks to the ability of ICE's platform to increase price transparency, handle high volumes efficiently and lower transaction costs, the volume of oil futures traded on what is now called ICE Futures Europe swelled. A regional exchange grew into a global one.

From 2007, the year ICE listed (with the ticker ICE), the company went on a buying spree of exchanges. The company snared the New York Board of Trade, which barters commodities such as cocoa, coffee and cotton, ChemConnect, which trades chemicals, and the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, now ICE Futures Canada that mainly trades canola. A sign of ICE's ambitions was the company's failed bid that year for the commodities-based Chicago Board of Trade.

Undaunted, the ICE takeover quest continued such that ICE, which earned US$6.6 billion in revenue in fiscal 2020, owns an exchange arm that boasts 12 global exchanges and six clearing houses that service the energy, agricultural and financial sectors. The haul includes the purchase in 2013 of the New York Stock Exchange, the world's biggest by volume. Among feats, ICE hosts nearly 66% of the world's traded oil futures contracts and is the world's leading clearer in energy and credit defaults. On top of that, ICE's exchange arm manages key global benchmark contracts. This list includes Brent oil, Euribor, natural gas, sterling short and long rates and sugar barometers of performance.

In recent years, ICE has branched out such that the exchange business, which brought in 55% of ICE revenue in fiscal 2020, is one of three divisions. The second arm, responsible for 27% of revenue in fiscal 2020, is the fixed income and data services business that sells data and technology to help investors make and execute decisions. ICE assess prices for roughly three million fixed-income securities spanning about 150 countries in 73 currencies, as well as providing advanced analytics and indexes for fixed-income markets.

ICE's other business is mortgage technology, which pulled in the remaining 18% of revenue in fiscal 2020. This arm has digitalised the mortgage process to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. The ICE mortgage business is the largest to automate the entire process, is the industry's leading platform with more than 3,000 customers, partners and investors, and the industry's only loan registry. This platform offers significant growth potential as more US mortgage originators are expected to turn to ICE's digitised offering.

ICE is a promising investment in three ways. The first is that the exchanges and other businesses possess sustainable competitive advantages that form a daunting 'moat' for the parent company - where moat is a colloquial way to say a company is protected from competition. Most of ICE's earnings are derived from trading and clearing fees from the exchange businesses and linked data. These businesses are moated because they enjoy economies of scale, network effects and industry structure that intimidate would-be competitors. Another moat for ICE is that when it comes to derivatives and listing, there are limited substitutes. The holder of benchmark contracts is favoured in negotiations, even if others are seeking to undercut on price.

A second advantage ICE enjoys is that the company is vertically integrated - it controls the execution and clearing of contracts. This enables the company to exert pricing power, attract volumes, and improve counterparty and systemic risk management.

The other advantage that makes ICE an attractive investment is the company is well managed. While ICE has a history of disrupting others, the Sprecher-led team has prevented ICE being disrupted. Management has steered the business towards attractive industry structures (derivatives exchanges), unique data sources and value-add analytics. As important, the team has largely directed ICE away from equities exchanges, where regulation and technology have upended the pricing power and volumes over the past 15 years. All up, ICE is well placed to provide compounded returns for its investors for the foreseeable future.

ICE, as do all businesses, faces risks. One is that the company's revenue is tied to trading volumes over which it has little influence. The fact that trading volumes often increase in turbulent and falling markets means that ICE is well placed to weather a market slump that falls short of a prolonged 'bear market' where trading was light. ICE's other risk is that its business is exposed to adverse changes to regulations. Moves by regulators to separate execution and clearing, and actions that might reduce trading volumes, would disrupt ICE's revenue. ICE is protected to some extent in this regard because regulators are aware that such moves against exchanges, especially ones that feature large derivatives trading, would boost trading costs, hamper innovation and, possibly, increase systemic risks.

ICE, thus, is well placed in a world where Sprecher's vision has helped electronic trading become the norm.

Sources: Company filings and website.

Apparently, Confucius did not say "One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words" after all. It was an advertisement in a 1920s trade journal for the use of images in advertisements on the sides of streetcars. Even without the credibility of Confucius behind it, we think this saying has merit. Each month we share a few charts or images we consider noteworthy.

You may have noticed that the tech sector has been under pressure lately. Bank of America's monthly fund manager survey shows allocations to the sector are at the lowest point since 2006 - yet in the unlisted world CB Insights has tallied up a surge in "unicorns" to 1,000! Totus Capital made a great point on the significant dispersion between different tech companies' accounting treatment of R&D spend. And ASX-listed fintech Douugh's "accumulated revenue" chart, as highlighted by  @lukewinchester9, was definitely an innovative approach to presenting financials. On the COVID-19 front, Bloomberg shows global air traffic is still less than half pre-pandemic levels, while The Economist shows most countries trending back towards "normalcy" - with China a notable exception.

Tech net allocation at lowest level since 2006

Source: Bank of America (via @daniburgz)

Now there are 1,000 unicorns

Source: CB Insights

Huge differences in how ASX software companies account for R&D spend

Source: Totus, livewiremarkets

Accumulated revenue chart by ASX-listed Douugh (DOU)

Source: Douugh Limited, @lukewinchester9

Global air traffic less than half pre-COVID level

Source: Bloomberg

The Economist's "Normalcy Index"

Source: The Economist

It was all about "chips" - semiconductors - in 2021and likely also in 2022. We (internally) break down our portfolio into three categories - those that produce the tools that enable disruption ("tools"), those enabled by these tools ("enablers") and a group of more downstream beneficiaries ("beneficiaries"). It's not the only way the portfolio is split, but it is a useful way to understand how value in disruption can be tracked.

This understanding resulted in a significant weighting toward the "tools" companies during the year, including semiconductor designers, makers and suppliers such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, Marvell, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Samsung and ASML.These companies are the equivalent of pick and shovel makers in a goldrush. They may not perform as strongly as the best miners, but they do produce a steadily-growing and valuable cashflow stream. And they are not as subject to failure if a particular "mine" (social media platform maybe, or app) doesn't work.

It's an area in which most investors do not participate. However, it is correct to say that the new disruptive business models which have created so much value for shareholders would simply not have emerged but for the increasing sophistication and sheer grunt of the chips on which they run.

Earlier this week, for example, the agricultural machinery company John Deere debuted a new autonomous tractor with attached tillage equipment at the CES trade show in Las Vegas. Deere's director of emerging technologies stated the tractor can run fully driverless at all times while tilling, saving significant time and labour. The company has stated it intends to expand the technology to include planting and weed control.

The scope of this is enormous. The feed from cameras, radar and possibly lidar (light detection and ranging) must be fused into a single moving picture - although it is not a picture, since every element of it must be 'interpreted' (and so involves graphics processing units, or GPU's, tied in to the central processing units, or CPU's). All of this intelligence is then used to drive the actuators which steer, till and spray across the mapped field. This is automation writ large.

The essential tools for these use cases are GPU's by the likes of companies Nvidia and AMD (which together generated +4.1 percentage points of return for Loftus Peak investors in 2021).

Companies such as these have created interlocking value loops with each other. A Google-map search for directions may take place on a Samsung phone, using a Qualcomm processor, to then be stored in a Microsoft Cloud.                                                                                                    

Semiconductor companies are powering disruption across all industries

Need to create recommendation engines for everything from movies to restaurants to clothing, or crank up machine learning systems to remove spam from millions of inboxes? Find the quickest way home? Play a game in smooth 4K? Conjure the metaverse itself?

Electric cars? These cannot run without power semiconductors from ON Semiconductor and Infineon. Ditto the home solar roof panels which require inverters and rectifiers to turn the DC current to AC, on which almost all appliances run. Even excluding battery electric vehicles, the silicon content of cars is set to triple in the next three years as drivers demand better safety features such as lane departure and school zone warnings, not to mention ever more sophisticated in-car displays and entertainment/navigation systems.

Indeed, the reason that used car prices have skyrocketed is because new cars are not available pending the required chips to finish them. Semiconductors are now critical in areas as diverse as shipping logistics, vaccine development and power grid management.

The Loftus Peak portfolio does not include semiconductor companies because it is a technology investor, trying to pick winners from a commoditised group of companies making low value-add components for computers. They are there because of their critical role in powering the cutting edge of disruptive businesses in all parts of the economy.

Where next for semiconductors?

The revenue limitations for semiconductor companies are not related to demand, but supply. Because of supply chain mayhem caused by COVID-19 coupled with an endless thirst for compute cycles required by advanced applications, there is simply not enough capacity in the world's major chipmakers to satisfy the demand. It's the reason that TSMC has allocated US$100b over the next three years to additional manufacturing capacity, more than double the normal sum. Virtually the entire company's production in 2022 is already sold, and the situation seems likely to continue into 2023.

The Economist magazine recently referred to data as the new oil - true enough - and it is the semiconductors that are producing, storing and generating value from it. There is no sensible reason for any fully engaged market participant to miss this trend. Investors should look to their own portfolios to ensure adequate, well-priced exposure.