One of the few areas to benefit from the 2008 financial crisis was peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, which allows people to bypass the banks with investors able to lend directly to individual borrowers. Cutting out the middleman makes it possible for those with spare cash to earn a higher return and for the borrowers to pay…
One of the main advantages of investment trusts over their open-ended counterparts is that the permanent pool of capital allows them to invest in less liquid holdings that could otherwise be difficult to access. This is because in the normal everyday course of business they would never be forced into selling the assets to fund…
One of the advantages of using investment trusts is that if you get the timing right you can benefit from the strong performance of the underlying assets and a narrowing of the discount. These sorts of opportunities don’t come along every day, but long-term investors might find that the India Capital Growth (LON:IGC) fund turns…
The £570m VinaCapital Vietnam Opportunity Fund (LON:VOF) has just announced a strong set of half-year results for the six months to the end of December. VOF’s NAV was up by 10.9% in US dollar terms over the period, which was well ahead of the 3% increase in the benchmark, and it has continued to do…
The stock market is driven by investor sentiment with share prices often trading nowhere near their true fundamental value. One way to take advantage of this is to adopt a contrarian strategy and look for out-of-favour companies with the potential to turn things around. Those who rely on this approach use various techniques to identify…
The £1.7bn Witan Investment Trust (LON:WTAN) has recently announced a mixed set of results for 2016. It operates in the global growth sector and has a highly unusual mandate as the majority of the portfolio has been outsourced to ten third-party managers. Over the course of the year it generated a creditable NAV total return…
The sharp fall in the value of the pound since the EU referendum has provided a major boost to the performance of internationally diversified funds. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been the Murray International Trust (MYI), which has just announced its annual results for the year to the end of December. Murray International operates…
RIT Capital Partners (LON:RCP), the highly regarded investment trust chaired by Lord Rothschild, has recently released its annual results for 2016 and confirmed that it is maintaining its defensive positioning. The £2.9bn fund began life as the Rothschild Investment Trust and was set up to manage part of the wealth of the UK branch of…
As an investor it is always reassuring to know that the fund manager and members of the Board have significant amounts of their own money invested alongside you. Without wishing to sound too cynical, this is the best guarantee that you can get that they will be acting in everyone’s best interests. Canaccord Genuity has…
One of the areas worst affected by Brexit was UK small and mid-cap companies, which sold off heavily in the immediate aftermath of the referendum. These sorts of businesses tend to be more reliant on the health of the country’s economy than the multi-nationals in the FTSE 100 and their share prices have recovered strongly…
