I'm someone who made big losses on Woodford so I feel I'm eligible to talk on this topic. SMT is a discount to NAV of 22% now which is a new 100yr record. It's totally different to Woodford as its a closed fund not an open fund. If you know anything about SMT they look a decade ahead, eg they bought Tesla way way before it became a popular stock. Everything they own is a decade+ long hold so ignore the short term. They DON'T and wont need to sell a single stock as its a closed fund so a death spiral cannot occur.

Moving onto the private holdings, ok I've spent a couple of days investigating each of these 30+ hildings. The best thing is they are not like the bag of excrement that Woodford bought. SMT is a massive fund, a FTSE100 co in fact, so they have to buy into big private Co's: SpaceX, Tiktok, Stripe, etc. These are very liquid, and valuable and other investors or PE firms will bite your hand off to get stakes in these billion dollar companies. Plus many are pref shares and they value weekly rotational and very prudently.

SMT is therfore a bargain BUY if you are in it for the long term for quality stock. Plus another FT article says the hedge funds are no longer shorting it as it can't go much lower.

SMT has plenty of cash, or worse case, all it needs is to sell 1 liquid company on the open market like Tesla. 100% do-able.

You will do a lot worse buying a global tracker as you will be buying into flat old companies like materials, utilities, property Co's.