Henderson Global Trust, now managed by Wouter Volckaert (pictured), underperformed its benchmark over the year to the end of January 2014. The net asset value total return was 4.7% while the total return on the benchmark was 9.2%. The discount widened from 3.8% to 9.4% and the effect of this was that the share price fell by 3.9% (equivalent to a total return of -1.2%).
The Board has agreed that the base management fee will now be 0.6% on all assets – before the fee fell to 0.35% on assets over £200m. The assets of Henderson Global are about £150m so this change has no immediate impact except that, at the same time, the Board has agreed that an £80,000 annual secretarial fee will no longer be charged by Henderson.