The board of the £110m Strategic Equity Capital investment trust is preparing to ask shareholders whether it can implement a placing programme to sell more shares.
The trust aims to raise more money from the market and, if approved, the placing programme will take place in August.
So far this year the trust has issued or sold from treasury a total of 5m shares, raising £10.9m. Under its existing authorities it can only issue a further 682,878 shares.
The Trust has benefited from strong performance recently. According to the latest factsheet from the trust’s managers, Stuart Widdowson and Jeff Harris for GVQ Investment Management, the performance over Q1 has benefited from constructive corporate engagement with companies with strong cash flows and good market positioning.
These include Servelec Group, which occupies 10.4 per cent of the trust, as well as e2v technologies, at 10.1 per cent of the trust.
Analyst view
Jonathan Ward, investment director for London-based Cannacord Genuity, said: “SEC is unusual in that it actually invests in small-cap companies, unlike some of its peers which can tend to have more of a mid-cap bias.
“The trust has tended to be more defensive than the broader smaller companies market in times of market turbulence while still capturing the upside when markets rise. By way of example it was the only trust investing in UK small caps to deliver a positive return in 2011 when markets fell. Under Mr Widdowson’s strong leadership we expect this trend to continue.”
