A People's trust for Citizen Smith

This new People’s Trust sounds very radical, says David C Stevenson, but it’s really a return to the historic roots of the investment-trust industry back in the Victorian era.

819-Smith-1200

Power to the People's Trust
(Image credit: © Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

I've decided to change tack this week and talk about a fund that isn't ready to go into your portfolio yet. The fund I have in mind is the brainchild of Daniel Godfrey, the former head of the Investment Association (IA), the fund managers' trade body. Godfrey left the IA after a tiny bit of controversy about the transparency of fund managers' costs. This has evidently emboldened him to think big, and he's just announced that he's going to set up something called the People's Trust in the first half of 2017: a brand new mutually owned investment trust investing in global equities.

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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.