Nick Train reveals new share he ‘should have owned years ago’

The veteran investor has added shares in a London-listed online car marketplace, writes Sam Benstead.

14th July 2025 12:52

UK equity specialist Nick Train has unveiled a rare new position in his Finsbury Growth & Income and Lindsell Train UK Equity portfolios.

The fund manager has added shares in Auto Trader Group (LSE:AUTO), the FTSE 100 online car marketplace. This comes after he bought Intertek and Clarkson for the first time at the start of the year.

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Train added Auto Trader shares after receiving capital from the delisting of Hargreaves Lansdown.

He said: “Frankly, we should have been invested in this company years ago, because we have long understood the attractions of companies with dominant positions in classified advertising and it is truly impressive that, for instance, Auto Trader attracts an audience 10 times the size of its nearest rivals.”

Auto Trader is a £7 billion company whose shares have risen 53% over the past five years. The dividend yield is a little over 1%.

Train said it was “better late than never” to buy the shares, and that he has found an attractive entry point.

“The current state of the used-car market and the cadence of Auto Trader’s introduction of its latest suite of car-retailer services have arguably crimped the rating of the shares and presented an opportunity to initiate, which we have taken,” he said.

The fund manager says that of those new services, “Deal-Builder” has delivered valuable new customer leads to the retailers, with over half of the leads being submitted outside traditional forecourt opening hours.

Train compared Auto Trader to some of his other investments that “control formidable data sets, which are a meaningful barrier against competition” and are also able to exploit their own unique data insights.

One of those is Rightmove, which was bought in 2023 but is now a 10% position in Lindsell Train UK Equity and a 8.6% position in Finsbury Growth & Income.

“Auto Trader and Rightmove sit alongside Clarkson, Experian, London Stock Exchange Group, RELX and Sage as London-listed companies doing interesting things that create value for their customers, via the application of AI tools to proprietary data. If they can continue on this path, we hope they too can achieve big, extended bull markets,” Train said.

Over the past five years, Nick Train’s UK portfolios have lagged the FTSE All-Share index.

UK shares have risen 71.5%, while Lindsell Train UK Equity is up 27.7% and Finsbury Growth & Income is up 23%. However, performance is similar over the past 10 years.

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