Murray International’s results for the year ended 31 December 2014 have been published. Over the year the total return on net assets was 3% and the return to shareholders was 1.7%, unfortunately both these figures were behind the 7.5% return on the company’s benchmark (40% of the FTSE World UK Index and 60% of the FTSE World ex-UK Index). The dividend was increased from 43p to 45p but part of this was paid from revenue reserves as earnings fell from 43.8p to 40.8p.
The fund was underweight the US (which was one of the best performing areas of the world over 2014). The manager increased the fund’s exposure to fixed interest securities over the year. The Chairman’s statement promised some attribution analysis in the manager’s statement but the statement only talked about economics (Bruce Stout, the company’s manager is quite concerned about Quantitative Easing) and made no mention of what’s happening in the portfolio. It might be that this appears later when they publish the annual report. The statement did find room for a lot of boring background stuff about the fund however.
MYI : Murray International results don’t explain underperformance