“The preliminary, unaudited, diluted net asset value of RIT Capital Partners plc (the Company) as at 31 December 2020 (with debt at fair value) was 2,292p per £1 ordinary share (30 November 2020: 2,159p).

This represents an unaudited NAV per share total return (including dividends) of 16.4% for the year. The 2020 NAV performance exceeded both of the Company’s investment KPIs: RPI+3.0% of 4.2% and the MSCI All Countries World Index (50% Sterling) of 12.7%.”

Very decent in the circumstances and now at a 7% discount to its December 2020 NAV. Doubt it will regain its premium rating anytime soon but am happy to continue holding. Might trim my position a little bit for CGT purposes as part of a wider tidying-up exercise.

The share price on 31 March was 1,806p so the effective premium then was 0.5%.

Global markets have rebounded 5% in April so far, so if we assume RIT has increased by 4%, its NAV now would be 1,870p versus 1,841.5p for the share price last night plus the dividend due at the end of the month. A discount of 1.5% therefore, but that’s a rough guess at best.

I make RIT’s NAV decline in Q1 2020 as 10.3%. The MSCI World GBP was down 15.5%, so RIT avoided a third of the downward move in markets.

So some downside protection but not as much as claimed in the recent annual reports.

Thanks Tom. Flip-flopping on major calls would be a concern but I haven’t seen any particular signs of that either. Perhaps it isn’t that surprising that the approach has become more conservative in recent years, with the change at the top utmost in their minds.

Keep up the good work.

@tom_grlla

Nothing from MS since my initial contact but I suspect he’s pretty busy so I wasn’t too fussed about chasing it up! The buying and selling confused me a little as well, at it’s pretty unusual for the manager to run his own discount control policy rather than the trust itself! It looks like Kepler are planning a research note on MNL fairly soon, so that may shed some light on the workings behind the scenes.

Difficult to know how the trust will fare without his founder. They were obviously working on the succession for a long time so you would think they looked at aspects like maintaining contacts. And the family continue to be big holders. For me, the funds and the lack of visibility into what they actually hold make it difficult to gauge what’s really going on. So it requires more trust (sic) than usual to keep holding.

@Nigel

Glad you found the article useful. To be fair to both Caledonia and RIT, the share price reaction is somewhat out of their control and we’ll need to see how the NAVs fare over the next few months to see how defensive they have been in this particular instance. SMT’s focus on big tech, which has held up better than most this year, has no doubt been a help.

But you’re right to highlight the uncertainty over part of their NAV. Caledonia has written down its leisure holdings, which have been most affected by the shutdown, but seem to be holding back on writing down everything else on valuation grounds. Given they would typically hold these private investments for several years, and many of them are fairly recent purchases, I’m prepared to cut them a little slack for a while. Their final results in May should add some more colour.

Interesting times … unfortunately!

RIT – I suspect performance will gently decline now that Jacob R is off the board – I think he’s hard to replace, both for his mind and his contacts.

I don’t have a problem with the external funds generally, as they tend to be the sort that ‘normal’ investors can’t access, ditto the private equity deals – I think you have to think of it as a way of accessing the parts other funds can’t reach…

However I still don’t have a sense of how to evaluate Ron Tabbouche, whereas Mickey Breuer-Weil always had a good reputation.