Exclusive to subscribers to the Money Makers Circle Contents - What's new this week - Latest trust profile - Trust news over the past week - Recent issuance and buybacks - Good reads - Video reviews - Trust price and NAV performance - Z-scores - Investment Trusts Handbook - Appendices
What's new this week On the podcast this week, I talk to Jonathan Simpson-Dent, the chairman of Edinburgh Worldwide (EWI), ahead of the forthcoming requisitioned shareholder meeting called by Saba Capital for January 20th. Saba now has a 30% stake in the trust and is looking to have all six of the existing direc...
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UPDATE: Smithson was delisted in February 2026, with shareholders offered a cash exit or rollover into the open-ended Smithson Equity Fund.
Smithson (SSON) was launched in 2018 raising a mammoth £823m at 1,000p per share. Managed by Simon Barnard and Will Morgan of Fundsmith, it follows a similar style to Fundsmith Equity in holding a concentrated portfolio of quality stocks but focuses on global small-cap stocks that are typically valued up to £15bn. Its shares had doubled by the end of 2021 and the share count ballooned from 82m to 177m with the shares nearly always trading at a premium to ...
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Our latest Q and A for premium subscribers is with Simon Barnard, co-founder and lead manager of the Smithson investment trust, which has been in the Investment Trusts Handbook model investment trust portfolio since the trust launched in October 2018 and has performed very strongly since then. Here is a link to the last Q and A we did with Simon in December 2020. You can also read Stuart Watson's profile from March last year by following this link.
When we spoke just over a year ago, Smithson was coming off its second successive year of strong growth, having more than doubled in size to a £2 ...
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UPDATE: Fundsmith returned +22% in 2021, -14% in 2022, +12% in 2023, +9% in 2024, +1% in 2025, and 0% from January to August 2026, well behind global equity returns and reducing its annualised returns since inception to 13.2% a year versus 12.4% for the MSCI World Index. Smith's half-year update for 2026 contained details of numerous portfolio changes following a shift in its strategy to take more heed of business momentum. He covered this in more detail in his 2026 half-year webinar.
Fundsmith Equity Fund and its forthright manager Terry Smith need little introduction. Launched in November 2...
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Jonathan Davis This week I have recorded a second video, this time looking mainly at the performance of the original handbook portfolio and the soon-to-be-finalised income portfolio. Stuart Watson, our new contributor, has added an in-depth analysis of Fidelity's proposed takeover of the Genesis Emerging Markets mandate, as well as a useful summary of first half investment trust performance. The next Q and A will be with Kartik Kumar, the young manager of the Artemis Alpha trust, and that will be posted as soon as it is ready (it has been recorded, but not yet processed). Most of the links to ...
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UPDATE: This trust was delisted in 2022 due to its ongoing performance issues, with shareholders given a full cash exit.
Stuart qualified as a chartered accountant before moving into journalism and has 20 years of experience of owning and writing about investment trusts from an independent standpoint. He is now producing regular fund profiles for the Money Makers circle. This post originally appeared on his blog but it has been added to our archive to add additional depth to our library of content.
Fundsmith Emerging Equities Trust, often shortened to FEET, is still struggling to keep up wi...
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UPDATE: This trust was delisted in 2026, with shareholders given the option of a cash exit or a rollover into a new open-ended fund run by the same manager and following the same strategy.
Stuart qualified as a chartered accountant before moving into journalism and has 20 years of experience of owning and writing about investment trusts from an independent standpoint. He is now producing regular fund profiles for the Money Makers circle. This post originally appeared on his blog but it has been added to our archive to build up our library of content.
One of the questions that often gets aske...
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This has been another choppy week in the markets, notable mainly for the fact that the rise in US bond yields persists. This is not unexpected, and it only takes the 10-year Treasury yield back to where it was before the pandemic hit, but it continues to bear down on the performance of the equity and corporate bond markets, while real yields continue to edge up, unhelpfully for gold. The Federal Reserve has so far resisted the pressure to change its policy stance, despite the US bond market having its worst start to the year for many years.
Jonathan Davis James Anderson's departure The plann...
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There are a lot of valuable things to read this week - it goes like that sometimes. Other weeks nothing much of interest seems to pass my inbox. The week itself has been dominated by the inauguration of Joe Biden as President of the United States, which fortunately went off peacefully. The markets are expecting a big stimulus package to back up the already exceptional amounts of monetary stimulus and help reignite economic growth after the vaccines start to kick in and bring an end to the current wave of stringent lockdowns we are seeing across many countries, although there seems to be a clea...
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For premium subscribers we periodically do podcast interviews with fund managers and analysts about current market conditions and funds (occasionally shares) that we invest in. This one is with Simon Barnard, co-founder and co-manager of the Smithson investment trust which has been in the Money Makers model investment trust portfolio since its launch in 2018 and has performed strongly since then. The transcript is a lightly edited version of the original 40-minute podcast recording.
Welcome Simon. How has the two year experience that you’ve had as a listed investment trust, in terms of the ...
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