BAILLIE Gifford’s £646 million Japan investment trust put in a “disappointing” performance in the six months to the end of February, with net assets falling by 16 per cent against a decline of almost 9% in the Tokyo Stock Price Index.
Chairman Nick Bannerman said that despite the poor short-term performance, which came after the trust outperformed by more than 14% in the year to August 2018, “we continue to believe that it is more meaningful to consider performance over longer time horizons”.
Noting that the trust’s net asset value had risen by 64.4% against the index’s 40.4% over the past three years, Mr Bannerman said the longer-term view was “encouraging”.
“Herein we see one of the challenges of equity investing in action,” he said. “Strategies can deliver good results over the long term but that does not make them immune to short-term challenges.
“To achieve a good long-term outcome we need to be prepared to accept short-term volatility and focus on actual investing - holding a portfolio of good companies with attractive growth prospects for the long term.”
The biggest individual detractors to performance were Cyberagent, Outsourcing and Zozo while the largest contributors were Pan-Pacific and HIS.
Mr Bannerman said that while there were “various signs of a global slowdown” during the six months, the board “remains optimistic”.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here