Discount Delver: the 10 cheapest trusts on 24 November 2023

Investment trusts, due to their closed-ended structure, offer investors the chance of picking up a potential bargain. Such an opportunity arises when a trust’s share price is lower than the underlying investments held by the trust (the net asset value, or NAV).  

However, a trust trading on a discount to NAV is not necessarily a buying opportunity. There’s likely a good reason why the trust is cheap, such as subdued short- or long-term performance, or poor investor sentiment towards how it invests.  

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In our weekly series, interactive investor highlights the 10 biggest investment trust discount moves over the past week. We publish this article every Friday, using data up to the close of trading the previous day.  

In total, nearly 400 investment trusts have been screened, with the data sourced from Morningstar. Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) have been excluded. We also strip out trusts with less than £20 million in assets and those that are not available on the interactive investor platform.

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Topping our table this week is Digital 9 Infrastructure (LSE:DGI9), which remains deeply out of favour following the scrapping of its second-quarter dividend and withdrawal of its 6p dividend target for its 2023 financial year. The trust focuses on what is sometimes called “the plumbing of the internet”, such as data centres and fibre-optic cables. However, as is common with other investment trusts that focus on a specialist area of the market, its income is a key attraction. A year ago, the trust was trading on a discount of -4.5%, but it now stands at nearly -60% to its net asset value (NAV). Over one year, its share price is down 47%.

Other specialist trusts also feature in the table, which reflects how investors have dialled down their risk appetite on the back of interest rate rises. Syncona (LSE:SYNC) and Vietnam Enterprise (LSE:VEIL), both adventurous strategies, have seen their discounts widen over the past week by 6.8 and 3.3 percentage points.

Specialist and alternative strategies are out of favour due to the higher level of income investors can obtain through lower-risk assets, with cash and government bonds with short lifespans offering yields of around 5%. Due to this, there’s less appeal in trying to obtain bigger returns for a higher amount of risk. As a result, discounts for investment trusts investing in alternative assets have been rising throughout 2023.

Source: Morningstar. *Data from close of trading 16 November 2023 to close of trading 23 November 2023.