Investment giant Invesco Perpetual has moved to fully disclose all of its investment trust holdings on a monthly basis instead of annually.
The group, which has a 13-strong suite of closed-ended funds including Neil Woodford’s £1.3bn Edinburgh investment trust and Mark Barnett’s £865m Income and Growth trust, will now report full holdings on a monthly basis with a three-month lag.
Andrew Watkins, sales director, specialist funds at the group, said the move had been made following lobbying by the Association of Investment Companies trade body, which had asked members to consider the move, and in response to the RDR.
“If someone wants to build a model portfolio they can’t use the trust if it doesn’t fully disclose its holdings,” he said.
“Also, if someone is trying to build an asset allocation model they will want to know how much a trust has allocated to the UK or US, for instance, but they can’t do that unless we have full disclosure.”
He added: “We don’t want to not be considered for model portfolios - we want to be analysed and if you don’t give people the tools to do the analysis you definitely won’t be on the list.”
Mr Watkins said the boards of the trusts “understood” the need for the change and “bought into it quite quickly”.
The move by Invesco comes after Morningstar research in March, seen exclusively by Investment Adviser, showed three of the UK’s biggest and oldest investment trusts, including the £2.8bn Alliance Trust, had made a shift to monthly portfolio disclosure.
The £2.8bn Alliance Trust, £1.4bn Murray International trust and £1.4bn Witan investment trust agreed to the measure in what has been seen as a sea change for the trust industry.
Morningstar also said last month that the transparency of the closed-ended universe had “improved markedly” in the past year following its May 2012 report called Investment Trusts: Why Transparency Matters.
Invesco said it began making monthly disclosures in April.
