By the way, few months ago I signed up to Money Makers (since you joined it) and it’s just GREAT. Amazing interviews and great content. Keep up the great work, might not look like it but you’re changing lives here.

Really interesting list and I’m happy to see that I own some of these as well (AVI Global, Blackrock Smaller Co, RCP, CGT).

Are you using this correction to “buy the dip” in any ITs?

Thanks for the kind words, Bill – that’s spurred me to add another table breaking down the performance over each of the last three decades to see how consistent each fund has been.

Over the longer period (30 years), the top performing trust (SMT) grew 33% faster than Monks, the bottom player of the top dozen double digit performers. Over 20 years the annualised returns of the top performer (SMT again) was 73% higher than the slowest of the top dozen (JP Morgan American), whilst over 10 years the rate of annualised returns of top performer SMT was 119% ahead of AVI Global, which came bottom of my list.

I find the consistency of the long-term returns of these trusts rather reassuring in these troubled times. The only problem is that I am unlikely to be around in 20 years, let alone 30.

Keep up the good work. It is much appreciated.

Hi Jonathan,

Scottish IT wasn’t included in the AIC figures I used for this piece unfortunately. I would guess they left it out because it is in the process of being merged with JPMorgan Global G&I. I think it’s roughly 8% pa over the last 30 years, so near the bottom of the list.

Survivorship bias is a problem as I noted in the article but I don’t have access to data that lists all the trusts that existed back in early 1992. I think the range of figures is still instructive, though, especially when it comes to setting an upper limit on potential returns. It also shows how fortunes and fashions wax and wane.

Thanks M. I think you should be able to do a straight copy and paste into Excel and sort the figures that way. But I might try and find a Word Press plug-in that offers that feature as well. UPDATED – found a plug-in so you should be able to sort the table on the page now.

In any case, a list like this is, of necessity, riddled with survivorship bias. Any trusts which did badly in the last century will have been dissolved, absorbed or become insolvent.

Longevity has no predictive power about performance whatsoever (see, for example, the Scottish Investment Trust)