IT Investor

For the last few years, the AIC has published a very useful piece of research showing which trusts would have performed best if you had put your full ISA subscription into them on 6 April each year since ISAs were introduced in 1999 and reinvested all the dividends received.

When the list was first produced in 2019, just one trust (the now-defunct Aberdeen New Thai) would have made you a trust ISA millionaire. There was no list in 2020, but in the lists produced from 2021 to 2024, there were around 30 trust ISA millionaires.

The 2025 list, published at the end of February and therefore before all the tariff kerfuffle, showed there were now 50 trusts in this category, thanks to the strong market returns over the course of the previous 12 months.

I reckon there were around 110 trusts in existence when ISAs were introduced in April 1999 that are still around today, so the 2025 list contains nearly half of all surviving trusts. The size of the sector has typically been between 300 and 350 over the last twenty years, so these 50 make up around perhaps a seventh of all the trust available to investors back in 1999. Many of those that have fallen by the wayside would have been acquired by the surviving trusts.

Here’s the full list taken from the AIC press release. I have added a couple of extra data points in the form of last year’s ranking and an annualised figure for the share price return, and made the table sortable.

^{Source: theaic.co.uk / Morningstar. AIC members only, excluding VCTs and companies that are winding up. The column headed “share price total return” shows the share price total return over the period based on a single lump sum investment on 6 April 1999. The column headed “total value” is the total value of an investment on 31 January 2025 if the maximum ISA limit for each year had been invested annually from 1999 to 2024, with the investment being made on 6 April each year.}

When ISAs first became available in 1999, you could have invested £7,000 a year. The allowance remained the same for a decade but then saw a few large jumps to £10,200 in 2010, £15,000 in 2014, and the current level of £20,000 in 2017. There were a few other inflation-linked increases along the way as well.

If you invested your full ISA allowance for each year, your total subscriptions would come to £326,560. So £1m represents a tripling of your contributions over a quarter of a century, or just over 9% a year on a compounded basis. We now have four trusts that would have generated £2m or more, equivalent to about 14% a year.

Of course, markets don’t work on an orderly basis with the same returns year after year; the sequence of returns affects the numbers as well. Broadly speaking, trusts that performed better recently will have produced a greater monetary amount despite having a similar or even lower annualised return over the whole 25 years. JPMorgan American is a good example of this — US market returns were weak in the 2000s but have been very strong in the 2010s and 2020s, so it takes fifth spot despite having a relatively low 10.5% annualised return. The opposite is true for abrdn Asia Focus, which comes sixth despite returning a much higher 15.9% a year.

Small remains beautiful

The presence of smaller company trusts has been notable in each version of this list, and it is a feature again this year. While non-UK smaller company trusts were among the biggest climbers this year, UK small-cap trusts were among the heaviest fallers as this particular sector continues to struggle.

Technology, biotech/healthcare and private equity all feature prominently. On a regional basis, Asia Pacific has arguably done the best although both the UK and Europe boast numerous appearances. Global funds have done pretty well, with most of the mainstream Global sector on the list, however, emerging markets and the flexible sector have very little representation. Part of this reflects the number of eligible trusts in each category of course.

Nearly the entire alternative asset universe is too young to be included in this list. Income trusts are largely absent as well, and those that do feature either have an enhanced dividend policy or have a fairly tenuous claim to belonging in those sectors.

For my profiles over at Money Makers, I have covered all but two of these 50 trusts, namely JPMorgan US Smaller Companies (which is pencilled in for next month) and JPMorgan European Growth & Income. In my portfolio, I currently hold five of the fifty, but I used to own nine others, where I should probably have been more patient!

Global markets are down by around 15% since the 2025 list was compiled, so it’s possible we could see fewer trusts in the 2026 list, and it may take a little while for the £3m mark to be breached. But of course that depends on what happens over the next several months!

How the list has changed over time

If you want to look at the lists from previous years, here are links to my previous articles or the original AIC press release:

• 2024 (32 £1m companies)
• 2023 (28 £1m companies)
• 2022 (30 £1m companies)
• 2021 (28 £1m companies)
• 2020 — no list produced
• 2019 (1 £1m company)

P.S. I’m not doing a portfolio review for the first quarter of this year as I’m planning to do these less frequently, probably just mid-year and year-end. For the record, I was down around 4.5% over the first three months and am now down around 9%, which is around a couple of percentage points ahead of global markets.

Disclaimer

Please note that I may own some of the investments mentioned above -- you can see my current holdings on my portfolio page.

Nothing on this website should be regarded as a buy or sell recommendation as I'm just a random person writing a blog in his spare time and I am not authorised to give financial advice. Always do your own research and seek financial advice if necessary!

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