An overweight position in financials helped Mark Mobius’s Templeton Emerging Markets investment trust (Temit) outperform the MSCI Emerging Markets index in the first quarter of the year.
In a quarterly update to investors, the £2.2bn trust reported a 6.2 per cent rise in its share price in that period, while its portfolio of assets increased in value by 6.5 per cent. The MSCI Emerging Markets index rose 5.4 per cent, the update said.
Mr Mobius has 32.2 per cent of Temit invested in financials, with three of the trust’s five best performers in the first quarter financial companies. These included Indonesian firm Central Asia Bank, which saw its share price rise 19.8 per cent in the first quarter.
At the end of March, Temit’s share price was trading at a 7.4 per cent discount to the value of its assets, and this has since widened to 8.5 per cent.
In the five years to May 7 Temit’s share price gained 48.1 per cent on a total return basis, while its net asset value grew 47.7 per cent.
