Mello Trust and Funds Event and ShareSoc AGM

This blog gives you the latest topical news plus some informal comments on them from ShareSoc’s directors and other contributors. These are the personal comments of the authors and not necessarily the considered views of ShareSoc. The writers may hold shares in the companies mentioned. You can add your own comments on the blog posts, but note that ShareSoc reserves the right to remove or edit comments where they are inappropriate or defamatory.

I managed to attend part of the Mello Trust and Funds Event in West London yesterday and although I had other commitments today, I may manage to attend the second day of the main Mello 2019 event tomorrow. If you have not attended one of these events before, it is definitely worth doing so. The only slight criticism I would have is that getting to Chiswick from South East London where I live via the slow District Line is not great. The wonders of the London transport network meant it almost took me two hours to get there. I’ll give a brief report on the sessions I attended, and what particularly interested me:

There was a good presentation by the young and enthusiastic George Cooke on the Montanaro European Smaller Companies Trust (MTE). This is a company I had not come across before and it looks to have a good performance record. It’s a stock pickers fund in essence but Mr Cooke’s approach to small cap company research seems similar to mine. However he covers the whole of Europe whereas my focus on direct investments is the UK. I will take a more in-depth look at this company.

I attended a panel session on investing in small cap funds and one member of the audience questioned why one would do so when you can invest in the companies directly. Here are two possible reasons: It can give you exposure to geographic or sector areas that you cannot adequately research oneself (as in MTE), and for UK funds it is always interesting to see what the high-performing fund managers are buying and selling even if you only get a limited view. That’s why I invest both directly in companies and in funds.

I also attended a presentation by Carl Harald Janson on International Biotechnology Trust (IBT) a company I already hold so I did not learn a great deal new. This is a sector specialist with a good track record and it is now paying dividends out of capital which has helped to close the discount to NAV when it used to be quite high. The discount is now negligible.

Several stand staffers in the exhibit area tried to sell me “income” funds but that proved difficult as I had to tell them I never buy income funds. For long-term returns, growth funds usually provide better performance and you can always sell a few shares to produce cash income – and you may be better off tax-wise also as a result. But many people buy funds for retirement income so they are attracted by the “income” name. This is where more financial education might be beneficial.

The last presentation I saw was by Nick Britton of the AIC (Association of Investment Companies who represent investment companies). Their web site is always useful for researching investment trusts and their past performance, which I tend to prefer as against open-ended funds although I do own a few of the latter.

Nick covered the differences between the two types of funds (open versus closed). His presentation suggested that closed-end funds consistently performed better for several reasons and he compared some funds of both types run by the same manager as evidence. There are a number of reasons why closed-end funds perform better in the long term and I was convinced by the statistics on this a long time ago. But Nick gave some more data on the subject.

So why do open-ended funds dominate the fund industry (£1.2 trillion versus £189 billion funds under management)? I rather expected that after the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) that platforms would no longer have a strong financial incentive to promote open-ended funds but it seems there are other reasons remaining which are not exactly clear. But it’s the investors who are suckered into buying open-ended funds who should know better. Like in most markets, folks buy what they are sold rather than do their own research and buy the best option. That’s particularly problematic on property funds which Nick was particularly scathing about.

I hope ShareSoc members are better informed. Which brings me on to the subject of their AGM which was held at the Mello meeting. This was a relatively straightforward event as there were no controversies of significance, although I did suggest that with more funds in the bank they might want to hire more staff and spend more on marketing. As one of the two newly appointed directors pointed out, few investors have heard of ShareSoc although they do enormously good work in promoting the interest of private investors and in educating them. In my experience, sales of anything often relate simply to how much money is spent on marketing even if some attention has to be paid to the most cost-effective channels. But if you don’t know what works best, you just have to experiment until you find the most productive approaches.

However ShareSoc membership is growing and it’s now twice the size of UKSA with whom merger discussions are now taking place – which I wholeheartedly support incidentally. There are also discussions taking place about supporting SIGnet activities, who run investor discussion groups, following the recent death of John Lander who led SIGnet for many years.

ShareSoc is spending money though on improving their back-end membership system which will help to improve the services provided to members.

In summary this was a useful event, and like all such meetings, as useful for networking and picking up gossip as much as from learning from the formal sessions.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

Post Date: May 19, 2019

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