Alliance Trust has seen a three per cent rise in its market value after revealing that it has appointed advisers to carry out a new strategic review, coinciding with the informal merger proposal from rival RIT Capital Partners.

RIT, the investment fund of 80-year-old City grandee Lord Rothschild, yesterday stressed that its approach to Alliance, which the Dundee-based company confirmed on Monday, was at an embryonic stage.

But Alliance, chaired since January by Lord Smith of Kelvin, issued a detailed statement revealing that advisers Canaccord Genuity had been recently appointed to advise on “a broad range of potential courses of action which the company might choose to take for the benefit of shareholders”.