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Closet Index Trackers – Investigations in Progress

Since publishing a previous article on closet index trackers back in December 2014, the topic has received a lot more coverage in the financial press. Closet index trackers are those investment funds that claim to be "actively" managed and charge fees more commonly appropriate to that investment management process, while in reality their funds are so similar to those of index tracking funds that they match the index. The allegation is that they are obtaining higher fees on the pretence of ...

Scottish Oriental Smaller Companies Trust AGM Report Summary

I attended the AGM of the Scottish Oriental Smaller Companies Trust (SST) yesterday (19/2/2015). This is an investment trust that is focussed on China, South-East Asia and India - yes there is not much Scottish about it apart from the fact that it is registered in Edinburgh and managed by First State Investment Management who are headquartered there (but whose parent is actually the Commonwealth Bank of Australia). Normally they hold their AGMs in Edinburgh but this year it was in First ...

Guide to Venture Capital Trusts and Foresight VCTs

The Association of Investment Companies (AIC) have just published a guide to Venture Capital Trusts entitled "Going for Growth".  It provides a good overview of this specialist sector of the market. It can be found here: http://www.theaic.co.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/files/AICVCTConsumerguide.pdf It includes a number of examples of successful investments made by VCT managers including that made by Foresight in Procam. However, the dangers of VCT investment were highlighted recently by the events at Foresight 2 VCT who recently held their Annual General Meeting. In their ...

Naibu and Majestic Wine – AIM companies losing directors.

The latest announcement (on the 18th February) from Chinese company Naibu (NBU) is that the non-executive directors have been unable to obtain any information about the company's trading position from the two executive directors (Lin Huoyan or Lin Congdeng). The former finance director, Zhen Li, resigned at the end of last year and the shares were subsequently suspended at the request of the non-executive directors on the 9th January pending clarification of its financial position. It seems the two executive directors have ...

Rolls-Royce Results and a New Director

Rolls-Royce Plc published their full year results today (13/2/2015). How does this champion of British industry and one of the FTSE mega caps (market cap £17bn) now look? Like all such large companies one could spend hours analysing the accounts because the initial "headline" data provided by the company in the announcement tends to err on the positive side. So the "highlights" are given as "Record order book of £73.7bn (that's slightly up at 3% on the prior year), underlying revenue and ...