Guinness Global Innovators, an investment management company, recently released its Q1 2026 quarterly investor update for its “Guinness Global Equity Income Fund”. A copy of the letter is available to download here. The Fund focuses on providing investors with global exposure to dividend-paying companies. In Q1 2026, the fund returned was -0.5% (GBP), compared to -1.6% for the MSCI World Index and 0.1% for the IA Global Equity Income sector average. The quarter saw notable changes in market sentiment driven by geopolitical tensions and energy market disruptions. The market shifted focus from growth sectors, particularly mega-cap technology and software, to value-oriented, defensive, international, and ‘physical economy’ stocks. The Fund gained from this transition towards defensive and value areas in the quarter. The letter discusses the impact of macro events and market dynamics on Q1 performance and examines software industry valuations amid rising concerns around AI-driven disruption. In addition, please check the Strategy’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2026.
In its first-quarter 2026 investor letter, Guinness Global Equity Income Fund highlighted RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX). RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) is a British based provider of information analytics and decision solutions for professional and business customers. On June 10, 2026, RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) stock closed at $33.98 per share. One-month return of RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) was 4.77%, and its shares lost 38.11% over the past 52 weeks. RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) has a market capitalization of $60.06 billion.
Guinness Global Equity Income Fund stated the following regarding RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) in its Q1 2026 investor letter:
“RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) is a leading provider of information-based analytics and decision tools, serving a wide range of customers across the legal, insurance, science, and financial services sectors. The company has been caught up in the so-called ‘SaaS-pocalypse’, with the Anthropic Cowork legal tool released on 12th January driving a sharp sell-off in the stock and a significant de-rating in the valuation. In the month afterwards to 12th February, the share price fell 31.1% (in GBP); the 1-year forward P/E ratio fell from 22.4x to 14.4x, and the dividend yield jumped to 3.3%. The company had been on our watchlist for some time. We felt the sell-off appeared overdone and therefore offered a good opportunity to add RELX to the portfolio.
RELX’s products facilitate decision-making for business-critical processes, making them deeply embedded in client workflows. RELX has established contributory databases in its various end-markets, and to gain access to a RELX solution, any new participant must provide all its own private data relevant to the service. The network effects associated with this are powerful; adding datapoints from new customers improves the predictive power of RELX’s models, increasing their value-add and ability to attract additional users, who then share more unique data. This closed loop means the majority of RELX’s content repositories cannot be replicated by AI scraping the web for publicly available information. Even in the niches where the raw underlying data may be more widely accessible, such as law statutes, RELX has created a moat through secondary content including expert commentaries, citation networks and data structuring. Reliability is crucial in the industries it serves, and RELX products are typically a negligible part of a customer’s total cost base, meaning clients are unlikely to risk switching away from these well-trusted and proven solutions. RELX has been augmenting its flagship products with AI and recently announced a partnership with Anthropic, further supporting our view that it is more likely to be an AI beneficiary than displaced by the pure-plays. We believe the recent sell-off is overdone and presents a rare opportunity to buy the shares at an attractive valuation.”
RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) is not on our list of 40 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds Heading Into 2026. According to our database, 22 hedge fund portfolios held RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) at the end of the first quarter, up from 25 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the risk and potential of RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
In another article, we covered RELX PLC (NYSE:RELX) and shared the list of best NYSE stocks to buy according to Wall Street analysts. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2026 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
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