W
hen researching a topic, every so often I will stumble across something that will stop me in my tracks. It could be some golden nugget of information that I had never heard before, or perhaps a calculation that spits out a number I wasn’t expecting.
Last week, I had one of these moments when looking at the returns on investment trusts.
Initially, I had focused on share-price returns alone. The Brunner Investment Trust, a global equity fund, had returned about 150 per cent over ten years, for example. The 3i Group trust, which invests in private equity, has returned a whopping 645 per cent.
But then I looked at these trusts’ total returns (the returns including dividends). The difference was staggering: the Brunner Investment Trust has given investors a total return of 222 per cent over the past decade, while the 3i Group trust has returned 938 per cent.
