How does this investment rate?

Aegis

Rollinghome wrote: »

But perhaps best not to assume that they have a clue about ITs and other non-commission paying investments etc.

Well, as a general rule it's bad practice to assume that someone will know something outside their speciality. I won't go to a plumber for advice on how to get my car running despite the fact that there are pipes in my car. IFAs will know about how investment trusts are traded and taxed, but if they don't specialise in offering advice about them, why would they know more than the basics? Furthermore, why should it be a bad thing for them to not know a great deal about investment trusts and therefore to talk about what they know rather than what they don't?

The IT in question does have a large weighting in the FTSE100, with over 55% of its net assets invested in FTSE100 companies from the top 50 holdings. The FTSE 100 has been a pretty awful set of companies to track in general over the last decade or two, so at least 55% of the assets have been in a pretty poor segment of the market. I think all of that is pretty fair to say, and I think that's all that was intended. The performance of the IT overall has also been quite appalling over the term that the investor has held it for, so again there's little to disagree on when it comes to the performance side of things. A 5% annualised return before tax should have generated over £18k from the £50 per month investment over that period.

I think it's clear that you've got a problem with IFAs and decided to go for the throat rather than trying to understand what a very long-standing and helpful poster was trying to say.

Now, it would be nice to move on and to talk about what the OP could do to improve his position without turning this into yet another IFA-bashing thread. Personally I think the OP could benefit greatly from a chat with an IFA to see if a unit trust/OEIC portfolio might be better for him/her. They're generally easier to understand and don't have the added complications of gearing and trading above or below NAV to worry about, so it all boils down to what they invest in and who controls the investments.