Why you should invest like a 19th century Scottish jute merchant

Dundee's jute barons needed diverse, long-term homes for their vast fortunes. And the investment trusts they created are still going strong. Merryn Somerset Webb explains why they are such good long-term bets.

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Jute made Dundee rich

In 1863, 46,983 tons of raw jute fresh from the deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers landed in Dundee. It was a 9,000 mile journey. And not a cheap one. But it made sense to the merchants and manufacturers paying for it.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.