A second chance at life for investment trusts

While the number of new issues remains restrained, improvements in governance and recent rallies are encouraging investors to take another look at investment trusts

Like so many others these days, the word 'miracle' has been flogged so hard and so often as to become hackneyed. That said, if a year ago you were asked what was needed for the average investment trust to outperform the FTSE All-Share by a margin of close to 6%, it's a word that would probably spring immediately to mind. The performance, which was real incidentally, was all the more impressive when you consider that the Goliath of the sector, 3i Group, materially underperformed the FTSE in 2003, meaning that its peers had to work that much harder to generate such a dazzling end of year res...