Investment trust insider on Finsbury Growth and Income – James Carthew: Finsbury Growth share buyback keeps Saba away
While aggressive buybacks have kept Nick Train’s Finsbury Growth & Income off Saba’s target list, next year’s continuation vote could prove pointless.
I promised to discuss Finsbury Growth & Income Trust’s (FGT) annual general meeting this week. Citywire’s Jeremy Gordon has already written up the highlights of the meeting, but I would like to expand on a couple of topics.
First, while I was pleased to see a decent turnout in the room, the percentage of FGT’s shares that were voted was just 38%, which is really not good enough. This week, I was really pleased to see the AIC push for change on this front. It has launched a new campaign ‘my share, my vote’, which is aimed at making it easier for investors who hold their shares through platforms to exercise their right to vote.
The AIC wants a change in company law that would fix this problem and force platforms to pass on information from companies to investors. While the odd platform may grumble about the extra admin that this would entail, the reality is that all of this can be done digitally at relatively little expense.
Some platforms are already far advanced down this route. Naturally, this would apply to shareholdings in all types of companies, not just investment companies.
The next step in this process would be galvanising investors into exercising their rights. Although, as I suggested last week, the simplest solution might be to give standing instructions to vote with the board’s recommendation unless the investor instructs otherwise.
Back to FGT’s general meeting. There was some debate in the room about… read more here