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[ BOARDS ]
Hannah Smith finds out what
is behind a flurry of activity by
investment trust boards
Board
games
A
t the end of a turbulent
2019 in the world of fund
management, one of the
industry’s best-known
names lost his investment trust
mandate after more than three years
of underperformance. The board of
the £1.3bn Edinburgh Investment
Trust sacked Mark Barnett, replacing
him with Majedie’s James de
Uphaugh on a lower management
fee. A combination of stock-specific
issues and Barnett’s out-of-favour
value investment style pushed
the trust into negative territory
over three years and onto a wide
discount. The board said it had been
“working hard to understand the
causes of this underperformance”,
which it described as a “major
disappointment”. It concluded that a
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