RELX (REL.LN / RELX.US)

The share price has been hammered over the past six months or so, falling from around £40 at its mid-2025 peak, with the sell off picking up pace after Anthropic launched its legal AI tools and spooked the market. At the lows the shares were down close to 50%, which in my view massively overstates the actual threat to the business. RELX is not being disrupted by AI, it is actively deploying it across all four divisions. The thing people are missing is that AI models need high quality, structured data to actually be useful, and that is exactly what RELX owns. In Risk, its fraud detection and insurance databases are built on decades of proprietary data that you simply cannot scrape or replicate. In Legal, LexisNexis sits on a huge body of curated case law and regulatory content. In STM, Elsevier’s research databases are essentially the definitive record of scientific knowledge. None of this is stuff a large language model can just replace. It is the foundation on which AI tools are built. RELX is using AI to make its data more valuable, not the other way around. Thursday’s results backed all of this up, with the shares up around 3% on the day and then jumping close to 10% yesterday. Group organic revenue growth of 7%, margins expandingu, guidance upgraded across multiple divisions and a 50% increase in the buyback to £2,25bn. It’s at around 14x FY26 earnings and a 35% discount to US peers, I think the valuation is not reflecting the quality, the growth or the cash returns on offer here. Hoping that yesterday is the start of a genuine recovery