The new fund aims to select companies that are benefiting from a “generational change in technology”.

The UK's Neptune Investment Management is launching a global technology fund in anticipation of tech disruption over the next decade.

The Neptune Global Technology Fund will be launched on 15 December and managed by the company's head of technology research, Alastair Unwin. It will invest predominantly in a concentrated portfolio of 40 to 60 securities in the technology sector.

The regionally unconstrained fund, which will charge an annual management fee of 0.75 per cent, will use the US dollar as its valuation currency and the pound sterling as its reporting currency. It will track the MSCI World Information Technology Index.

Neptune expects the next decade to bring significant disruption within stock market indices, driven mainly by technological advances. Targeting the technology companies that drive this disruption will therefore present a “compelling” opportunity for investors, the company said.

“Many UK investors’ portfolios lean heavily towards UK income funds and UK bond funds and are underweight the US and Japan. Yet this is where many of the key technological disruptors are found. Likewise, investing passively will offer no protection because we believe that 30-40 per cent of the large companies in most mature stockmarkets will be eviscerated by this change,” said Neptune's founder and chief executive, Robin Geffen.

“There is a major risk that the broadening and acceleration of technological change over the next decade will weigh heavily on the returns of the stock market as a whole. By investing in those relatively few companies that are benefiting from this generational change in technology we believe the Neptune Global Technology fund will enable clients to diversify away this very major risk to their portfolios’ returns over the next decade.”

Unwin, who joined Neptune in May last year as manager of the company’s technology global sector model portfolio, noted that the digital economy is set to hit £3.2 trillion ($4.8 trillion) by 2020, according to recent estimates.

“Having the expertise to differentiate between the winners and losers of this revolution will define investment returns over the next 10 years,” he said.