IT discounts and premiums

IronWolf

I thought people might find this useful, a list of all the Investment Trusts listed on the London Stock Exchange together with their prices and tangible book values so you can work out the discount/premium for each

Main Market

http://investingsidekick.com/investment-trusts-lse/

AIM

http://investingsidekick.com/investment-trusts-aim/

The AIM list has a few other financial stocks in there as well as its hard to get a list of just ITs so be careful with that one.

Glen_Clark

Quite a difference to the one I have been using. For example they put Alliance Trust on a 2% premium. Wheras the Financial Times puts it on a 12% discount. I don't know who is right http://markets.ft.com/research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=ATST:LSE

westy22

My money will be on the FT being right.

IronWolf

Glen_Clark wrote: »

Quite a difference to the one I have been using. For example they put Alliance Trust on a 2% premium. Wheras the Financial Times puts it on a 12% discount. I don't know who is right http://markets.ft.com/research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=ATST:LSE

Interesting, FT uses Thomson Reuters data whereas this uses Morningstar data.

I'll have a look to see which source is more reliable

Edit: The Thomson figures do appear more reliable, so the page has been switched to use those

bowlhead99

Agreed, 12% discount sounds about right for ATST. For example yesterday morning they announced Monday night's NAV of 516.5p. So given Monday's price closed at 455p, that's only 88% of the NAV you have to pay for. It's not a premium.

Picking another one out of the hat, BGS (Baillie Gifford Shin Nippon PLC) announced yesterday their Monday NAV of 314-317p depending on the basis, while having a share price of 338p. So a premium of 6-7% ish. The linked spreadsheet said book value is only 188p, and puts it on a 79% premium...

ASCH (aberdeen smaller companies high income): investingsidekick says the book value is 169.45p while the NAV published by RNS yesterday says its 242p

So, not a particularly good list on those examples if it is being touted as a source for discount/premiums- I only looked at those 3, and 100% of them gave me completely useless figures for book value. The share price seemed broadly OK.

I know you have an interest in that site Ironwolf so you might want to do something about it before promoting it further. Obviously there's a broad disclaimer that "No guarantee is given that any of this information is accurate. Always do your own research before investing.". This is common sense, but if the inaccuracy is huge and not in any way consistent (ATST book value understated, ASCH overstated, implied discounts misstated massively) it's absolutely useless as a filtering tool.

Would be interested how you source your book value data to build it. Manually or automatically extracted from individual RNS releases using some complex code? Fed by financial statements which are perhaps several months out of date? Bought daily from an information service provider and fully licensed for commercial onwards publication?

If the latter, perhaps it's worth having a word with your provider given you are likely paying them huge amounts of cash. Hopefully the ads on the site which were displayed when I followed your links are giving you enough bankroll to implement some fixes

Edit: I see you just mentioned it comes from Morningstar. If I go to morningstar.co.uk and bring up ATST, they have Est. NAV and Last Actual NAV both at 516.5p which is what ATST themselves published on yesterday's RNS. You must be pulling a wrong field, as it can't be currency conversion or something like that because different trusts' book values are off by different percentages?

westy22

I usually trust the AIC figures as they are updated regularly. http://www.theaic.co.uk/aic/analyse-investment-companies

IronWolf

OK, I found the problem, the reported book value ps on Morningstar doesn't match the last recorded NAV. I've switch to the Thomson data where it appears (it doesn't have much for the smaller ITs so these still use Morningstar)

So the figures should all match what you'd expect now on the LSE page

The AIM figures are still a bit of a mess but I'll sort it out soon. I'm going to go through them manually and fix them, as well as remove the ones that aren't proper ITs.

Edit: The AIM page is fixed as best as it can be, given the more illiquid companies though it is always going to be very unreliable scraping for data on them.

IronWolf

westy22 wrote: »

I usually trust the AIC figures as they are updated regularly. http://www.theaic.co.uk/aic/analyse-investment-companies

Thanks thats a useful resource. But it appears to include a lot that are only sold at auction, so normal investors cant buy them through their usual broker.

It also doesn't include the smaller AIM listed Investment companies which don't have as timely data, but where you get some real bargains as a result. That was my main goal in this list, to find these hidden gems trading at huge discounts.

IronWolf

bowlhead99 wrote: »

If the latter, perhaps it's worth having a word with your provider given you are likely paying them huge amounts of cash. Hopefully the ads on the site which were displayed when I followed your links are giving you enough bankroll to implement some fixes

Edit: I see you just mentioned it comes from Morningstar. If I go to morningstar.co.uk and bring up ATST, they have Est. NAV and Last Actual NAV both at 516.5p which is what ATST themselves published on yesterday's RNS. You must be pulling a wrong field, as it can't be currency conversion or something like that because different trusts' book values are off by different percentages?

I wish those ads made enough money to buy a live data feed! They only make a few pence a day, but it covers the cost of hosting a website almost.

The data is scraped from free websites, I've got it checking several different ones now so should be accurate.