Elite Radar: Baillie Gifford Japan Income Growth fund

Encouraging performance

Last November marked six years since Shinzo Abe was formally elected prime minister of Japan and 'Abenomics' - his extraordinary stimulus programme - was launched. It has been an eventful, but largely successful, six years: the TOPIX is up 92.5% to 26 November in yen terms and the Nikkei 225 has risen 113%, according to FE.

Since the Japanese stockmarket bubble burst at the end of the 1980s, poor equity returns and a deflationary environment had been plaguing the Japanese economy. Indeed, both indexes are still down an eye-watering 43% since 29 December 1989. It is only when you look at total returns that the TOPIX has come close to recovering: it had regained all but 5% of losses in January 2018. It is this income element of total returns in Japan that leads me to this quarter's Elite Radar choice.  Baillie Gifford's James Budden: 'The star manager? Not for us' Abe's third arrow was a number of struc...