Investment trust insider on JPMorgan Indian – James Carthew: JPMorgan Indian off the boil as India reaches melting point
Last month’s comfortably passed continuation vote belies years of underperformance by this trust. Its two mid-cap rivals look better even if India’s financial regulator worries about hot money.
When I last wrote about India in October 2022, I noted that JPMorgan Indian (JII) would face a continuation vote at its 2024 annual general meeting. At the time, I doubted it would survive given its net asset value (NAV) had trailed the MSCI India index by about 46 percentage points over the previous five years.
However, in the event at the AGM last month, the trust passed comfortably with just 3.8% of shares voted cast against continuation.
At first glance that’s quite surprising. After all, it is not as though the trust’s performance showed any improvement – since my article, investment returns have lagged the benchmark by almost another 10 percentage points. The discount is still way too wide too with the shares trading 19% below NAV. So why did it get the benefit of the doubt?
Timing may have been a factor – the 12-month period to end September 2023 covered by the last annual report was a rare period of outperformance, with NAV up 1.2% against the benchmark’s 0.7%. This illustrates the danger of relying on performance data from just one period…. read more here