Capital Gearing Trust plc - CGT

A nice investment trust for the risk averse traders.

A very defensive investment trust with a good record of avoiding the worst of equity marketsā€™ crashes since itā€™s launch in 1982.
Has a high percentage of UK & US short dated index linked government bonds.

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Iā€™m a little surprised Capital Gearing isnā€™t discussed here more often given its popularity elsewhere. That said, itā€™s focused on wealth preservation and many Freetraders are younger/in the accumulation phase.

Over the past few decades since the 1990s, CGT has returned an average of roughly 10% a year and Peter Spiller ā€“ who is among the UKā€™s most respected managers ā€“ has run the trust for 40 years.

While it hasnā€™t kept pace with SMT, The Tortoise and the Hare comes to mind when comparing them:

cgt

CGT preserving 10% growth per year for the past three decades? Is this before fees? Thatā€™s basically as good as the S&P 500, I find that somewhat not believable but maybe proven wrong. I thought CGT ran around the 3-4% preservation number once taking into account fees.

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This sort of historical data is hard to come by and often imperfect. Past performance is no guarantee of future results either.

The figure is taken from the blog below about investment trusts which uses a dataset from Jan 1992 to May 2020. Iā€™d imagine it is post-fees but I may be wrong.

CGTā€™s latest annual report says it has ā€œprovided a compound share price annual return (with dividends reinvested) of 15.1% per annumā€, while this research article puts the annualised return at about 13%.

Whicheverā€™s most accurate, itā€™s fair to say CGT has a remarkable record with only 1 negative year in 40.

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