Star stockpicker Nick Train buys more shares in his Finsbury Growth trust
Star fund manager Nick Train has ploughed over £200,000 into his struggling Finsbury Growth and Income Trust, in a further show of support for the 100-year-old trust’s investment strategy just weeks before a crunch continuation vote to mark its centenary.
Train, who has managed the £1.3bn trust’s portfolio since 2000, bought 25,000 shares in the group at an average price of 824p per share, according to a statement made to the London Stock Exchange on Wednesday.
His purchase of roughly £206,000 of Finsbury shares takes the co-founder of Lindsell Train’s stake in the trust – one of the largest in the UK – to nearly five per cent, in another show of faith that the fund will turn a corner.
At the start of last year, Train bought the same number of shares in the trust, which were then trading at 899p per share, shortly before he told shareholders he was “running out of ways to say sorry” for the trust’s stagnant performance. He then purchased more shares in July.
Finsbury, which has a mandate to invest in London-listed companies, ended 2025 with an underlying return of 2.3 per cent despite the FTSE 100 rallying more than 20 per cent in what was its best year since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Train’s purchase comes ahead of a pivotal continuation vote at its annual general meeting (AGM) on 15 January on whether what is one of the UK’s oldest investment trusts should be broken up. Train and his co-founder Michael Lindsell have vowed not to take part in the poll, which is the first of its kind in Finsbury’s history, despite them both holding major stakes in the trust.
Much of the UK investment trust industry has struggled in recent years against trying backdrop of stuttering performance in UK stocks and retail investors’ embrace of tracker funds to gain equity exposure.
Like many others in its sector, the Finsbury is currently trading at a heavy discount to the sum total of its holdings of over five per cent, despite its board launching a string of buybacks last year in a bid to prop up its share price.
But the trust’s recent struggles belie a longer-term performance that has helped Train become one of the UK’s most celebrated fund managers. Since taking over Finsbury at the turn of the millennium, the fund is up over 700 per cent far outstripping its benchmark, the FTSE All Share, which has risen 317 per cent.