The Lemon Fool

Perpetual Income & Growth Investment Trust (PLI) has removed its performance fee and raised its base fee, with the changes taking effect from 1 April.

If Perpetual Income & Growth's ongoing charge falls to 0.72 per cent it will become a cheaper way to access manager Mark Barnett's stockpicking skills than his Invesco Perpetual Income (GB00BJ04HX60) and High Income (GB00BJ04HQ93) funds, which can be bought from investment platforms for ongoing charges of 0.86 per cent and 0.87 per cent, respectively.

But the cheapest way to access Mr Barnett remains Edinburgh Investment Trust (EDIN), which has an ongoing charge of 0.61 per cent.

Registration maybe necessary to access this. (I'm not sure as I have previously registered):

http://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/201 ... ticle.html

I hold none of the above.

TBH I am surprised to hear there are funds still getting away with levying these fees. The rise and rise of the lower cost index funds will surely put pressure on these funds which should benefit the small investor.

Being required to reluctantly follow the lead of the other Mark Barnett run Edinburgh Trust (EDIN) that dropped the performance fee a while back. Since Woodford left and Barnett had to step up at Invesco Perpetual performance has dragged. So has become increasing difficult to justify the levy of performance fees to supposedly independent investment trust boards of directors who have apparently been asking questions.

We're all fishing in the same pond, some say, but some have better years than others. Mark Barnett's EDIN has more or less matched Woodford since the latter left, but the PLI portfolio has done poorly since the end of 2015, So, I suspect the two portfolios are run deliberately on slightly different lines to provide some differentiation. EDIN is higher yielding than PLI, for example, and that's deliberate I expect.

Mark Barnett ran PLI as sole manager (?) from 1999, and matched EDIN pretty much step for step - in fact performing rather better until 2015. Had you checked in 2014-15 you could honestly say Woodford was lagging Barnett: then Woodford overtook Barnett in summer 2015 and is slightly on top.

Swings and roundabouts - who can say what will happen next? But to simply say Mark Barnett has performed poorly since he took over, condemnds the guy unfairly, in my view.

But you could say that both of them have performed really badly compared with Fundsmith, with has returned roughly double either of the other managers over five years.

Comparisons are never simple!
Arb.