The F&C Investment Trust has seen a big jump in investor interest this year while there’s been less attention on Scottish Mortgage, analysis of research trends on Trustnet shows.
The 10 most popular trusts with Trustnet readers can be seen in the table below and they are all familiar names.
Source: Trustnet, Google Analytics
The final column shows the share of pageviews in the Association of Investment Companies (AIC) universe that each trust captured over the opening half of 2023. With 5.15% of all trust pageviews going to Scottish Mortgage, it remains the most researched trust with our readers by a clear margin.
The trust is one of the best-known in the market and is held by plenty of investors, so it should be little surprise to find it is the most-researched trust despite (or even because of) its recent struggles as interest rates were hiked and its favoured high-growth stocks sold off.
However, a more interesting exercise with this data is to look at the change in the share of pageviews over two periods to see if trusts are being researched more or less.
When we compare Scottish Mortgage’s share of Trustnet research this year with 2022, there’s been a big fall in interest. While the trust still accounts for 5.15% of investment trust pageviews, this is down from 6.62% last year.
Indeed, this 1.47 percentage point drop in research activity is the largest fall in the AIC universe.
Other well-known trusts with significant falls in pageviews compared with 2022 include defensive mixed-asset trusts Ruffer, Personal Assets and Capital Gearing, growth equity strategies Mid Wynd International, Edinburgh Worldwide and BlackRock Throgmorton, and natural resources play BlackRock World Mining.
However, as the research share falls for some trusts, it must increase for other and the 25 with the largest rise in their share of Trustnet pageviews compared with last year can be found below.
Source: Trustnet, Google Analytics
By far the biggest jump was seen in research into F&C Investment Trust, which resides in the IT Global sector and is managed by Columbia Threadneedle Investments head of asset allocation (EMEA) Paul Niven.
It is currently the second most popular investment trust on our research platform, accounting for 3.46% of trust pageviews. This is marked increase on the 1.76% it accounted for last year and has taken it from being the third most research trust in the AIC universe to second (knocking City of London down one place).
F&C Investment Trust was the best performing member of the sector in 2022, limiting losses to just 0.9% when its average peer fell 20.7%. However, it is in the bottom-quartile for the opening half of 2023.
Analysts at Kepler Partners described the trust as a “one-stop shop” for broad global equity exposure and highlighted the changes to positioning made by the manager of recent years as reasons for confidence.
“The diversified nature of the strategy is likely to lead to similar risk characteristics to the FTSE All-World Index benchmark,” they said.
“However, Niven’s active management and gradually increased allocation to high-quality, early-stage private equity offers the potential to generate alpha during periods of market turbulence. We believe Niven’s well-timed rotation out of growth into more value-focussed and income-generating strategies will likely reduce the volatility and offer a more diversified exposure in future.”
The most common type on trust on the above list is UK equity income strategies, accounting for seven of the 25, followed by global equity income with three entries.
This move towards income is even more clear when we look at research changes on Trustnet across the entire AIC universe, broken down by sector.
Research change by AIC sector
Source: Trustnet, Google Analytics
While the IT Global remains the most heavily researched on Trustnet (it’s home to some of the most popular trusts such as Scottish Mortgage and F&C Investment Trust), IT UK Equity Income is a close second.
Trusts in this sector are the second most viewed on Trustnet and account for 13.14% of the AIC universe pageviews in 2022, up from 11.58% in 2022. IT Global Equity Income is less popular overall, but pageviews have grown from 4.58% to 5.98%.
This is similar to the trends seen in the Investment Association universe, when interest in income investing has also been growing as investors seek to make their money work harder amid high inflation and higher interest rates.