The Lemon Fool

As reported in Investment Trust Insider, the premium in the SP of Independent IT has reduced from 20% to par. This IT managed by Max Ward has had a stellar few years. I therefore took the opportunity of replacing Standard Life UK Smaller companies with IIT.
See https://citywire.co.uk/investment-trust ... -news-list
Regards
ermintrade

ermintrade wrote:As reported in Investment Trust Insider, the premium in the SP of Independent IT has reduced from 20% to par. This IT managed by Max Ward has had a stellar few years. I therefore took the opportunity of replacing Standard Life UK Smaller companies with IIT.
See https://citywire.co.uk/investment-trust ... -news-list
Regards
ermintrade

Ermintrade, thanks for that update.

I have looked at IIT from time to time, and had noted the more recent fall of the premium, but was put off by the number of builders that it holds, (and which I would prefer to avoid due to their cyclicality).

Independent has always been idiosyncratic, totally dependent on the whim or prejudice or whatever you like to call it, of Max Ward. It is essentially the retirement fund for him and the chairman Douglas McDougal. Nothing wrong with that and maybe that is the way that investment trusts should be run, on a conviction basis rather than trying to follow a benchmark. Just remember that this style of investing is more volatile than most. But you cannot say that they management does not have skin in the game!

Dod

It's been one of my best performers in recent years, better than Scottish Mortgage I think, and best of all it has a very reasonable ongoing charge cost of 0.25%

I will be looking at a top up now the premium has fallen finally

It's continuing to fall though, currently 663p, down 3.4% today. I think I would prefer to let that "shake out" if I was going to dabble. The downside is that being a growth trust the yield is minimal (0.92%) so nothing to offset or compensate when the SP slides..

The market in general is down today of course but over the last few years it has been stellar.

Dod

In some ways I see Manchester & London (MNL) similar to IIT. MNL targets growth via technology and has large positions in the big technology stocks, whereas IIT holds more of a spread of mainly UK conviction growth stocks. Both have fallen more in the "easing back" of markets over the last few days.

Ironically, I am not sure why IIT is in the global growth sector, as it holds 91% UK stocks. And similarly, why MNL is in the UK growth Sector as most of its holdings are US and some Asian technology stocks.

Currently MNL is on a discount of 5.2%. IIT is on a discount of 0.5%