Investment trust insider on RIT Capital – James Carthew: RIT Capital, the ‘family office in a box’, deserves to re-rate after 2020.
RIT Capital Partners (RCP) published its results for 2020 last week and they were pretty good. In fact, it was one of the best-performing investment trusts in the AIC’s Flexible Investment sector in terms of underlying net asset value (NAV), beating its MSCI All Countries World Index benchmark by a decent margin.
The share price returns do not look quite so hot, however. The trust moved from trading at a fairly high premium to trading at a discount, and this left investors nursing a small loss for the year. The good news is that, helped by some share buybacks, the discount is now narrowing.
I was fortunate in that it was one of the closed-end funds I added to on 19 March last year. It really is not obvious to me why some investors in RIT Capital panicked along with the rest of the market. The trust is designed to cushion against savage market moves and has always tried to communicate the significant difference between an investment in it and an investment in pure listed equities.
RIT Capital’s NAV did dip a little in the spring of 2020 in response to Covid-19, but it was already hitting new highs by the autumn and has continued to power ahead since.
Read more here