Few investors elect to receive a paper copy of the annual report of a trust and even fewer keep them from year to year. But I recently found a pile of annual reports from investment trusts I used to manage, some of which continue to prosper. Their content is a revelation.
In the mid-1990s, the Annual Report of the Finsbury Growth Trust (now the Finsbury Growth & Income Trust, FGT) ran to just 28 pages, excluding the cover. Inside, it consisted of a one-page summary of the year, a two-page chairman’s statement and a four-page investment review, including a list of the largest investments and an analysis of the sectors the fund had selected. There was one page explaining personal equity plans (now rebadged as Isas) and one for company information (comprising a list of directors, managers, the group’s address
