Investment trust insider on Henderson Alternative Strategies
James Carthew: ‘bargain’ trust poses too many questions
For a discount player, there are very few pockets of real value in the investment companies market today.
Boards are much better at controlling discounts and the search for income means that very few funds with a yield are on a meaningful discount. Really wide discounts tend to be associated with funds with illiquid portfolios and/or a record of disappointing investors.
Now and then I trawl through the ‘bargains’ looking for funds that might offer real value. One I alighted on this week is Henderson Alternative Strategies (HAST). As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, it could be about to benefit from the forthcoming initial public offering (IPO) for the Cuban fund, Ceiba Investments.
The last time that I wrote about HAST was back in 2014, when it was still called Henderson Value Trust. Henderson had taken on the management of the fund in April 2013 and were faced with a difficult task of turning around an underperforming portfolio of illiquid investments.
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