Why new trust ideas need the hand of experience

Brewin Dolphin's John Newlands explains why investors should stick with veteran managers even when new and exciting opportunities enter the market.

Investment trusts have always looked to developing markets in their quest for better returns than can be readily achieved nearer home. As early as 1881, for example, Foreign & Colonial investment trust, already 13 years old at the time, had investments not just across North America and in Europe but in Australia, Colombia, Guatemala, India, Japan and New Zealand. A whole year before that the forebears of another modern day vehicle, the Dundee-based Alliance Trust, had formed the Hawaiian Investment and Agency Company to provide mortgages to farmers in the Pacific islands, on the back ...