Hi Simon,

These numbers came from an AIC press release, which you can find at https://www.theaic.co.uk/aic/news/press-releases. They only release these sort of figures now and again though.

As far as I know, the best way to get this data otherwise is to manually go into the performance charts on the AIC site and amend the date range to get the time period you want e.g. https://www.theaic.co.uk/companydata/city-of-london-investment-trust/performance

The AIC data comes from Morningstar and seems to go back to January 1970, assuming the trust’s launch date wasn’t later than that of course. NAV total return data only seems to go back to the middle of 2008. You can add several tickers to a single chart rather than doing a new chart for each trust but, even so, it is a bit fiddly. I then use the power function on a spreadsheet to calculate an annualised return figure as I find this a better way of comparing one trust against another.

Trustnet’s charting tool at https://www2.trustnet.com/Tools/Charting.aspx is another useful resource but it only goes back to January 1995 and it only shows the precise total return data from that date (and over the usual latest 1, 3, 5 and 10 year periods). You can choose a later start date you then have the estimate the actual total return figure just by looking at the chart.

Yahoo Finance does some decent historical data as well but I haven’t used that for trusts. It uses an adjusted closing price to reflect past dividends so you can calculate a total return figure using two dates. This has the option to export the data into a CSV file.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/CTY.L/history?p=CTY.L

Hope that’s useful. I’m sure there are other free resources available as well but I haven’t checked around for other sites recently.

Stuart

Hi Simon, an excellent question that’s difficult to answer unfortunately. I think it’s fair to say that some trusts can outperform specific index funds but it’s certainly not guaranteed and almost impossible to know which ones will in advance. I believe we can tilt the odds in our favour by looking at how they have performed in the past, and whether the same processes are still in place and look valid, and overall how credible their managers appear. But at the end of the day, it’s a judgement call.

Concentrated portfolios should give a better chance of both outperforming and underperforming by a wider margin, as does buying a trust that is more highly geared. Lower costs also help and some of the larger trusts like SMT aren’t that much more expensive than global trackers. I’d also say that there are some more specialised areas of the market, such as UK smaller companies, that are less well-researched and where there is lower liquidity and where trusts as a group seem to perform a little better against their benchmarks. There are also areas like infrastructure and private equity where it is harder to buy an index fund equivalent.

Buying on a big discount, like SMT at around 20%, can also help assuming of course the discount does narrow significantly over your period of ownership. SMT is currently on a larger discount that it was during the financial crisis and the initial COVID lockdown, which I’d say suggests it’s much more likely to recover than not. But it’s going to be a volatile ride given the strategy the trust prefers.