Discount Delver: the 10 cheapest trusts on 6 February 2026

Investment trusts offer a potential bargain thanks to their closed-ended structure. Such an opportunity arises when a trust’s share price is lower than the value of its underlying investments (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 it. 

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In this weekly series, interactive investor highlights the 10 biggest investment trust discount moves over the past week. 

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 £30 million in assets and those that are not available on the interactive investor platform.

The software sell-off takes its toll

Software stocks fell sharply this week after artificial intelligence (AI) business Anthropic launched an agent, Claude Cowork, which can perform routine tasks relevant to areas such as the legal sector and is viewed in some quarters as a disruptor of enterprise software businesses.

That has been painful for plenty of widely followed UK-listed shares, from RELX (LSE:REL)to London Stock Exchange Group (LSE:LSEG), Experian (LSE:EXPN) and Sage Group (The) (LSE:SGE), as well as some popular stocks listed overseas. But it has also dealt a blow to investment trusts with a focus on the software as a service (Saas) space.

Leading the table this week is HgCapital Trust Ord (LSE:HGT), a private equity fund which focuses on Saas businesses. The trust’s shares have tumbled in the last few days, prompting the discount to blow out to around 27%.

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The recent turmoil in markets presents two separate challenges for the fund. Investors are firstly doubting the strength of its portfolio. The market volatility and questions about the Saas sector could also jeopardise a potential initial public offering (IPO) for HgCapital’s top holding Visma, something that was expected to happen this year.

HGT was once a reliably strong performer, and one of the few private equity trusts that tended to see its shares trade on a (small) premium. But it has entered rougher waters in the last year, and shareholders are down to the tune of around 20% for 2026 so far, as at 5 February.

The trust this week published a note outlining its strategy to make sure portfolio holdings have an “AI-first” approach.

Molten Ventures Ord (LSE:GROW) also appears in the table this week, having seen its discount advance to around 36%.

A racy proposition with a venture capital approach, the fund lists Saas and enterprise as one of its four key sectors. One of its other core sectors is AI, meaning it could still benefit from such disruptions in other ways.

From the gold sell-off to individual setbacks

It’s not just equities that have been volatile this week, with both gold and silver prices giving up plenty of ground, having previously hit fresh record highs.

Two funds that have ridden high on the back of the precious metals rally in the last year but will have suffered this week, CQS Natural Resources G&I Ord (LSE:CYN) and Baker Steel Resources Ord (LSE:BSRT), see their discounts widen this week.

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It’s also worth noting that a couple of trusts have gotten “cheaper” – but only thanks to some pretty sizeable setbacks.

3i Infrastructure Ord (LSE:3IN), widely regarded as a very solid core infrastructure fund, announced that it had seen a “material worsening of the lending appetite for German fibre roll-out businesses”, thanks to a major player in this space restructuring its debt in December.

This is bad news for DNS:Net, a holding that represented 5.6% of the portfolio at the end of September, with the investment team worrying that it won’t be able to securing funding to roll out its fibre-to-the-home network. As such, they expect to write down its value entirely.

“Assuming no further debt can be raised to support the continuation of the roll out, we now expect that the value of the existing equity in the company is likely to be written down to zero in our next valuation of the portfolio at the March 2026 year end,” the trust said. That led to share price weakness for the trust and a wider discount.

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Meanwhile, Chrysalis Investments Limited Ord (LSE:CHRY), which invests in private companies operating in sectors such as fintech and is now focused on returning capital to shareholders, announced that its NAV had fallen by 3.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025.

This largely related to the share price weakness of Klarna Group (NYSE:KLAR) since it listed on public markets in September. The buy now, pay later specialist, whose shares are down by around 50% since IPO, represented 11.1% of the Chrysalis portfolio at the end of 2025.

As per usual, we also see some discounts widen without an obvious major trigger, from The European Smaller Companies Trust PLC (LSE:ESCT) to Gresham House Energy Storage Ord (LSE:GRID).

Source: Morningstar, close of trading 29 January to 05 February 2026.