The Association of Investment Companies’ sector changes to help investors compare ‘apples with apples’ have both pros and cons. The investment trust sector has seen a sea change in recent years. Once a sideline, alternatives have entered the mainstream with new launches focusing on areas such as debt, infrastructure and unlisted equities. Even within equity strategies, fund managers have sought to use the full powers of investment trusts to venture increasingly into smaller, less liquid...

Pessimist, thrill-seeker or beginner? There is a fund to suit every type of investor. No one who lies awake at night fretting about their savings should be in an artificial intelligence fund, while someone with 40 years to invest doesn’t need the constraints of a boring defensive fund. With that in mind, we consider a smorgasbord of options for a variety of different investor types and situations. Youthful beginner Youth is a superpower in more ways than one. Let’s look at two investors: one...

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 referendum, investors would have baulked at the idea of a hard Brexit; three long years later, gasping for any resolution to the tortured political process, they welcomed the certainty provided by an emphatic victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party. The gloom finally started to lift for UK shares. The turnaround actually started ahead of the general election in December, with the Investment Association UK all companies sector the second-best...

With Brexit still unresolved, is the British economy a good bet? The narrative on the UK tends to follow a familiar pattern: yes, UK shares are cheap, particularly domestic-facing small caps, but few are going to reinvest until Brexit is resolved. Brexit paralysis While the Conservatives, who this week won a landslide majority in the UK general election, promise to Get Brexit Done, this also means concluding a trade deal with the EU by the end of 2020. No country has ever negotiated a trade...

‘There have been some environments in which absolute return funds could perform’ With around 25% of global government bonds on negative yields, there has never been a greater need for alternative defensive and uncorrelated investment options. In theory, it should be a time for absolute return funds to make hay, but their erratic performance history continues to deter investors. It has been another tough year for the IA Targeted Absolute Return sector. For the year to date, the average fund in...