When weighing up investment trusts to add to your portfolio, cost is a key consideration. The greater the charges associated with a fund, the better your investments must perform to deliver you a return. One of the biggest costs are the fees investment trusts pay to fund managers for managing the portfolio; investment trusts may also pay a performance fee if the manager outperforms certain ...

The internet has revolutionised many areas of the financial services industry. One such innovation is enabling retail investors to directly lend their cash to fledgling companies or individuals through peer-to-peer lending. Investment trust VPC Specialist Lending Investments (VSL) has been established to give investors lower risk exposure to the online lending market. This involves lending ...

Peer to peer or P2P lending is proving very attractive to the income-starved investor. At a time when their savings account is paying less than 1%, peer to peer lenders claim to offer rates from 5-10% for lending to individual and small businesses. In theory it also allows you to bypass the unpopular banking sector. But can it beat the income available on shares? And are investors taking more ...

Investors who diversify their portfolios can achieve a more stable return because many of the ups and downs in the individual holdings will cancel each other out. The obvious way to do this is to allocate your money across different asset classes and geographic markets, but there are a number of uncorrelated funds that can take the process a stage further. One of the least correlated areas of all ...

The Government has increased the number of eligible investments that can be held in a Stocks & Shares ISA, Junior ISA and Child Trust Fund. These changes came into effect on 1 July so you can take advantage immediately as long as your provider is up to speed. There are three new types of assets that you can shelter in one of these tax-efficient wrappers, with the first being securities ...

Quality not quantity looks to be the story when it comes to new investment trust issues in 2015. According to the latest monthly report from Winterflood Investment Trusts £1.59 billion has been raised in the first three months of the year including issue activity and new issue activity, compared with £2.04 billion for the first three months of 2014. Fundraising across the investment trust ...