Freedom Calls: 25/8/25, “A sunny bank holiday weekend and Powell signals interest rate cuts”

From the team at Freedom Asset Management

There are few things in life quite as reliable as bad weather on a UK August bank holiday weekend…  but not so this weekend - 3 days of glorious sun, warm air and (at least in Guernsey) crystal clear seas.  I am sure we will be paying for it for the next 10 years, but in the meantime, let’s just enjoy it!

Pictured: the pristine white sands of Shell Beach on Herm, just a 20 minute boat journey from Guernsey, August 2025

This week’s articles:

• 10,000 days’ Cody Willard and Bryce Smith (advisers to US Technology VIP) talk about “Twilio – the communications infrastructure for the AI Era and Voyager Technologies – a barbell bet on the LEO economy”
• Canaccord’s Justin Oliver (adviser to Opus Global Growth) talks us through the commodities markets in “Precious metals keep shining”

Please remember we have Cody and Bryce travelling to London, Guernsey, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Hong Kong in September, so please reach out for a slot on their travels.  We will also have our Managed Income fund lead, and Opus Global Freedom investment committee member Ramon Eyck in Abu Dhabi and Dubai in late September.

Please scroll down to read the articles.

Performance – also quite sunny out there…

The week was looking decidedly uncertain until Friday, when US Fed Chair Jerome Powell signalled an interest rate cut in September, which then propelled a number of US stocks, especially the tech stocks.  As of writing this morning, Hong Kong seems to have followed Wall Street’s lead with the market strongly up on high volumes.

Source: * Estimates Freedom Asset Management as at 17/8/25. Please note depending upon how the funds are invested a small number of underlying funds can price 1-2 days after we take our estimates above so final published NAVs may vary.  Estimated GBP returns are from a $1.25 FX rate on 31/12/24 and also launch date of USVIP 10/2/25, ** Note fund prices quarterly and includes 5% discount to NAV expressed as 5% performance above for 2024, *** FT Markets as at 17/8/25, I shares.

We held an investment committee meeting on OGF (our balanced fund) last week.  Performance this year has been particularly strong.  We decided to take a little risk off the table, so took equities down from 62% to 60%, selling part of our equal weights S&P500 position.  We also undertook to diversify (a little) away from the US with a small position in an emerging market fund run by RedWheel.

We were pleasantly surprised to come across this chart in Citywire, which shows OGF outperformance vs the sector over the last 2 years, remembering we put in place the new investment process in January 2024.  The fund is now ranked 15th/183 competitor funds over 2 years.  The sector is Mixed Assets – Conservative USD.  

Source: Citywire to 31/7/25

https://citywire.com/asia/fund/opus-global-freedom-fund/c559947?periodMonths=24

Justin and the team at Canaccord put through a major reorganization of the OGG (growth) fund in the last 3 weeks and that is starting to show some strong results.

Ukraine update – the peace momentum is lost

It seems difficult to believe that only 10 days ago (15^th August) there was a peace summit in Alaska between Putin and Trump, and last week, seven European leaders were hastily arranged in the White House to ensure Trump remained engaged in the war negotiations…. after lambasting him for leading peace negotiations a week earlier.  

Here we are, a week later and Ukraine is no longer in the news, there is no longer any talk of peace and Trump no longer seems interested.  If there are to be any security guarantees, Trump says the US will “coordinate”, but Europe will need to pay for what he sees as “Biden’s war”.  It is quite depressing, because in the absence of Trump, there is no leader on the European side with the gravitas to pick this up.

We had a call last week with our sanctions counsel to get a feel for the post-Alaska sanctions environment.  It seems that we could see some movement on OFAC (US) sanctions – i.e. we could see some loosening of OFAC sanctions on Russia, but OFSI (the UK) and the EU seem as firm as ever.

The Wall Street Journal wrote 23/8/25 an interesting piece saying that Putin is keen to negotiate, because as of August 19^th 2025 although he controls 99.6% of Luhansk, he only controls 76.5% of Donetsk, 73% of Zaporizhzhia and 71.8% of Kherson (see chart below).  

UK military intelligence have estimated that to complete the take-over of these 4 provinces, at the current rate of progress will take 4.4 years and cost 2 million killed and wounded Russian troops – something which the WSJ believes Putin would like to avoid with talks.  If you look at that chart and consider what the initial war aim was – i.e. complete subjugation of Ukraine, it has been an abject failure on Putin’s side, but I am not as bullish (any longer) as the WSJ that Putin wants to deal.  He can play a very long game.  Let’s see.

This week, today, we have bank holiday Monday in the UK and Guernsey and next week we have Labor Day in the US on Monday 1^st September.  Labor Day has traditionally marked the end of the summer for stock markets.  Expect there to be lots more news from next week!

I am based in Guernsey for the week, wherever you are in the world, please let me wish you a wonderful and peaceful week ahead.

Adrian

Co-Founder // Freedom Asset Management

Guernsey // Abu Dhabi // Hong Kong

M: +44 7781 40 1111* // M: +971 585 050 111 // M: +852 5205 5855*  (*also WhatsApp)

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“Twilio – the communications infrastructure for the AI Era and Voyager Technologies – a barbell bet on the LEO economy” 25/8/25

By 10,000 Days’ Cody Willard and Bryce Smith, Advisers to the US Technology VIP Fund

Today we’re going to talk about a few trades we executed in the fund last week.  First, we picked up more CoreWeave (CRWV), a stock that has pulled back almost 50% from its all time highs (we initially bought much lower), and is at the heart of driving the AI Revolution.  This is one of the fastest growing tech companies on the planet, is fully backed by Nvidia, and is at the heart of the boom in AI Inference that is taking place right now. If you’d like our full analysis on CoreWeave, please reach out.

We also initiated small positions in two new Revolutionary technology companies: Twilio (TWLO) and Voyager Technologies (VOYG). Our analysis suggests both offer unique, asymmetric risk/reward profiles driven by major secular trends in artificial intelligence and space commercialization, respectively.

Twilio (TWLO): The Communications Infrastructure for the AI Era

Twilio is the de facto standard, cloud-based communications platform for software developers. The company’s genius was abstracting away the immense complexity of the global telecom industry, allowing any developer to easily integrate services like SMS, voice, video, and email into their applications via simple APIs. This has made Twilio a critical, if often unseen, piece of the modern internet’s infrastructure.

Our investment thesis centers on three core pillars, with AI as the primary catalyst:

1. Explosion in AI-Driven Development: As AI dramatically lowers the cost and complexity of building software, we anticipate an explosion in new application development. Nearly every new app incorporates communication features, from simple multi-factor authentication texts to complex in-app chat, driving foundational demand for Twilio’s services.
2. The Agentic AI Revolution: The emergence of agentic AI is a paradigm shift. For AI agents to be useful, they must “talk” to the real world—making phone calls, sending text messages, and managing emails. Twilio is the essential infrastructure that will enable this interaction. Every action an AI agent takes to communicate with a human will be a usage-based transaction on Twilio’s platform, creating a direct and scalable revenue driver tied to AI adoption. The most immediate large-scale application is AI for customer service, a field built entirely on business-to-consumer communication.
3. A Defensible, Cloud-Agnostic Platform: Twilio’s moat is its vast, global network of pre-negotiated contracts with telecom companies in over 180 countries—a barrier that is difficult and capital-intensive to replicate. While hyperscalers like Amazon and Google represent a competitive threat, Twilio’s neutrality is a key strategic advantage. As a vast number of enterprises pursue multi-cloud strategies, a best-in-class, agnostic provider like Twilio becomes a necessity, not a choice, to ensure their communications infrastructure works seamlessly across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Furthermore, Twilio’s data platform allows developers to integrate first-party data from sources like Salesforce or Snowflake, enabling them to build context-aware AI agents. This presents a major opportunity to upsell customers beyond basic API usage.

From a valuation perspective, Twilio appears unassuming. The stock trades at roughly 20x forward earnings, with analyst consensus forecasting modest 8-11% revenue growth.  We believe these estimates fail to price in the agentic AI catalyst. Our models suggest revenue could grow at least 15% annually, with gross margins expanding from 50% to 55%. This could yield a 26% annualized return over the next five years, a compelling proposition for a critical infrastructure player.

Voyager Technologies (VOYG): A Barbell Bet on the LEO Economy

Voyager Technologies offers a different risk profile. After its IPO in June, the stock surged from $31 to nearly $74 before making a full round trip, creating what we see as an attractive entry point. Voyager is a "barbell" investment, pairing a stable, cash-generating business with a high-potential moonshot.

The stable side of the barbell is a mission-critical space and defense business. Voyager provides controllable solid propulsion rocket technology for the thrusters on Lockheed Martin's Next Generation Interceptor (NGI), a cornerstone of U.S. missile defense with sticky, long-term funding. This segment provides recurring cash flow and a financial moat for the company's more ambitious venture.

The moonshot is Starlab. In partnership with AirBus, Voyager holds a $218 million NASA contract to build a commercial, free-flying space station intended to be the successor to the 25-year-old International Space Station (ISS), which is set to be decommissioned around 2030. As launch costs plummet thanks to SpaceX’s Starship, a new commercial economy in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) is emerging for microgravity research, advanced materials manufacturing (semiconductors, fiber optics, 3D-printed organs), and industrial development. Starlab is positioned to be the foundational infrastructure—the "pick-and-shovel" provider—for this entire LEO economy.

A bet on Voyager is a bet on its visionary CEO, Dylan Taylor, a long-time space investor and commercial astronaut (and friend of Cody’s). However, the venture is significantly de-risked by its structure. Starlab is a joint venture with a syndicate of established industry leaders, including Airbus, Mitsubishi, and MDA Space, with Palantir providing the exclusive AI and data OS. This consortium lends immense technical credibility and distributes execution risk.

While the risks are clear—execution, funding gaps, and competition from Axiom (full disclosure: 10,000 Days owns Axiom in the private markets)—Voyager's barbell structure and powerful syndicate mitigate these challenges better than any pure-play competitor at the moment.  We view this as a venture-capital-style investment in what could become one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in space. For this reason, we will keep the position relatively small as we track its development.

Cody Willard and Bryce Smith

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“Precious metals keep shining”, 25/8/25

By Canaccord’s Justin Oliver, Adviser to Opus Global Growth

Precious metals are on top of the leaderboard so far this year among the major commodity price gains:

Platinum, gold, and silver are ranked #1, #2, and #3.  These shiny metals have become safe havens for many investors as a result of unsettling geopolitical crises in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.  Global trade tensions have also heightened demand for these metals. US tariffs on steel have boosted the price of this commodity.

Natural gas is up on Trump's deal with Europeans to buy more US natural gas. Lithium is also up for the year to date, by a percentage in the double digits, on supply concerns.

The price of copper has been volatile this year. It is currently up 5.8% in 2025, reflecting slow global economic growth, especially in China.  Iron ore is also up, but not by much, due to sluggish growth in China.  That could change once the Chinese start building a $167 billion Tibetan mega dam, the largest dam on Earth.

Grain prices are flat to down slightly so far this year on record corn and soybean yields. The price of a barrel of crude oil is down sharply this year on weak global demand and ample supplies. It may have more downside if there is a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

The spot price of gold has been consolidating its 2025 gain since the spring. It topped out at a record high on April 22, i.e., before the US bombed Iran's nuclear facilities on June 21.  The abating of Trump's Tariff Turmoil and the prospects of a ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine have put a lid on the gold price for now.  The price appears to be aiming to find support at the bottom end of the upward channel that started in late 2023, before moving to new record highs.  We are still targeting a gold price of $4,000 per ounce by the end of this year (see below).

The price of gold has been rising ever since the US froze the foreign exchange reserves of Russia after the country invaded Ukraine in February 2022.  The central banks of countries that don't share America's values and interests have been buying more gold and selling US dollars.

During June, international reserves rose to a record $16.4 trillion, consisting of $13.9 trillion of currencies and $2.5 trillion of gold.

By the way, helping to keep a lid on oil prices is the flattening of Chinese crude oil imports. That may be because the Chinese are driving more Evs (see below).

Justin Oliver

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