Alliance Trust beats benchmark in first results since completing transformation – Alliance Trust (ATST) has published half-year results to 30 June 2019. Over the period, the company completed the process of simplifying itself following the disposal of Alliance Trust Savings; 99.5% of the portfolio is now allocated to global equities.
Chairman’s take
ATST’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, offered his thoughts: “Global equity markets rebounded strongly in the first half and we delivered a total shareholder return of 16.8% against the 16.7% return of our benchmark index. Since we appointed Willis Towers Watson (the manager), our equity portfolio total return has been 22.2%, outperforming the benchmark, which returned 21.5%. We have also outperformed many of our peers in a challenging period for active managers.
With the sale of Alliance Trust Savings having closed in June, we have completed the simplification of the trust as approved by our shareholders just over two years ago following the strategic review. We now have less than £14m invested outside of global equities and we expect this to be realised by the end of the year.
We started 2019 expecting there to be increasingly difficult global economic conditions and continued political uncertainty, and this has proved to be the case. The first half brought significant volatility in the equity market which may well continue. We believe that our diversified, best ideas investment approach means that the trust is well positioned to take advantage of volatile markets, as all our stock pickers have extensive experience of a wide variety of market environments over many years, including both bull and bear markets. We are confident in their abilities to identify the winners and we believe they will deliver attractive investment performance over the long-term.”
ATST: Alliance Trust beats benchmark in first results since completing transformation