Significant changes have been announced at Alliance Trust (ATST) following the intervention of an activist investor. The fund has been through a difficult time, but ineffective corporate governance meant that it needed someone from outside the company to really shake things up. Alliance Trust is the second largest investment trust operating in the global sector,…
In my article for the October issue of Master Investor magazine, Smooth Operators, I looked at which investment trusts have the longest record of increasing their dividends. Leading the way was the City of London (CTY), which has recently published its Annual Report for the year ended 30th June 2015. The City of London Investment…
The slowdown in China has had a huge impact on the prices of raw materials with iron ore losing more than two-thirds of its value and copper falling 50% from the highs back in 2010/11. This has contributed to the recent stock market volatility with the mining sector bearing the brunt of the sell-off. One…
…The funds with the largest exposure to an individual company I have written before about the superior performance of concentrated funds, but it is possible to take it too far. If a manager invests an overly large proportion of his portfolio in one particular company it could leave investors exposed to a significant level of…
The market often overreacts to bad news and where this is the case it can create a decent buying opportunity for long-term investors. A good example is the specialist litigation fund, Juridica Investments, which trades on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker JIL. My colleague, Filipe R Costa, looked at the diversification benefits of…
Market sell-offs tend to provoke some rather indiscriminate selling, which can provide buying opportunities for more discerning longer term investors. One potential example is the Worldwide Healthcare Trust, a London listed investment trust that trades under the ticker WWH. The one billion pound fund aims to achieve a high level of capital growth by investing…
Smaller companies funds are generally considered to be higher risk than their large cap counterparts, but during the recent market sell-off the sector has held up better than you might imagine. This is because these sorts of businesses are more reliant on the UK economy and less susceptible to the slowdown in China and the…
On June 17th I wrote about three cautiously managed investment trusts that had delivered steady returns while limiting the downside risk. Don’t let a Greek farce turn into a tragedy looked at funds that could protect your portfolio against the losses arising from a Greek debt default, but they should also be able to withstand…
The land of the rising sun has had more false dawns than most investors can remember, but the election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in December 2012 could go down in history as the point when it all changed. His radical policies that have come to be known as Abenomics are designed to breathe new…
The slowdown in China has had a big impact on many of the world’s emerging economies. This has undermined local share prices, with the MSCI Emerging Markets index falling 2% in both 2013 and 2014, with a further 4% decline in the first seven months of this year. Despite the recent poor performance most investors…
