The 12 investment trusts you should pop into your portfolio for 2016

Fund expert David C Stevenson picks 12 investment trusts to buy - including property, global stocks, and a few contrarian plays.

I've said here before that I expect 2016 to be lacklustre for most real-estate investment trusts (Reits) and infrastructure funds, but there are some potential exceptions. The first of these is Grainger Trust (LSE: GRI), one of the UK's largest residential-property owners. While I expect UK house prices to drift a little higher this year, this isn't about house prices it's a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) story. Grainger's estate would be a perfect fit for a pension fund looking to buy recurring income streams with an element of inflation-proofing. Some very active funds (such as Crystal Amber) have already bought in precisely for this reason. So I think Grainger will find itself in play this year.

It's a similar story for German residential-property fund Taliesin (LSE: TPF). It owns several Berlin apartment blocks. Today's open market value on most of these is well below their replacement cost. But in a recent chairman's statement, Taliesin said that, once its portfolio had been converted from rental to leasehold (privatisation), its net asset value (NAV) would exceed €40 a share almost twice the most recent (albeit quite historic) NAV reading.

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David C. Stevenson
Contributor

David Stevenson has been writing the Financial Times Adventurous Investor column for nearly 15 years and is also a regular columnist for Citywire. He writes his own widely read Adventurous Investor SubStack newsletter at davidstevenson.substack.com

David has also had a successful career as a media entrepreneur setting up the big European fintech news and event outfit www.altfi.com as well as www.etfstream.com in the asset management space. 

Before that, he was a founding partner in the Rocket Science Group, a successful corporate comms business. 

David has also written a number of books on investing, funds, ETFs, and stock picking and is currently a non-executive director on a number of stockmarket-listed funds including Gresham House Energy Storage and the Aurora Investment Trust. 

In what remains of his spare time he is a presiding justice on the Southampton magistrates bench.