By ANNE ASHWORTH, Daily Mail, 25 January 2025:
The investment trust sector, the custodian of £269 billion of the nation’s savings, can trace its history back to 1868.
But 2025 is set to go down in the annals of this industry as the year when it faced what some saw as an existential threat.
The concern may have abated a little in past days. Nevertheless, investment trusts seem set for upheaval, in a shift that could offer opportunities for investors happy to take some risks.
In recent weeks, the deep-pocketed US activist investor Boaz Weinstein, founder of Manhattan hedge fund Saba, has launched an offensive against seven trusts, pledging to ‘rehabilitate’ them.
This week he was defeated in his attempt to take over the £1.2billion Herald Investment Trust – a victory for shareholder democracy..
Battles loom in the coming days for control of the other six trusts: Baillie Gifford US Growth, CQS Natural Resources Growth & Income, Edinburgh Worldwide, European Smaller Companies, Keystone Positive Change and Henderson Opportunities..
To date, Weinstein’s rhetoric – which includes dismissing criticism of his arguments as ‘jingoistic’ – has not been persuasive.
QuotedData analyst James Carthew also points what he calls Saba’s ‘cherry-picking’ in its use of trust statistics.
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