Research tools FAQ

We cover all investment companies that are AIC members, whether they are investment trusts, non-UK investment companies or venture capital trusts (VCTs). This includes UK REITs that are structured as funds (not trading company REITs). We also cover investment companies that are not members of the AIC provided they are listed on the London Stock Exchange (including the Specialist Fund Segment). However, we are unable to provide full data on investment companies that are not members of the AIC.

There are three main ways of finding investment trusts (investment companies) on this website.

• Compare Companies is the easiest way to get started. You can sort by AIC sector, or by other criteria such as performance, discount or yield.  
   
• Advanced Compare works in a similar way but gives you more freedom to configure your search criteria and data points or look back into historical data.  
   
• Investment Company Screener allows you to filter the universe of investment companies on around 20 characteristics, then view, sort and chart data. Use the scales icon to display investment companies side by side, together with details about their portfolios.

You can opt to receive email alerts for particular investment trusts so you never miss a notification from them. You can also customise these alerts so you receive emails based on movements in a trust's share price or discount.

Another way you can monitor your investment trusts is to set up portfolios of trusts you're interested in. You can create as many portfolios as you want and give each portfolio a name that's easy for you to remember. You'll need to set up a free AIC account to save your portfolios so you can access them when you return to the website.   

Once you have set up a portfolio, you can view data on that portfolio and customise which data points you see. You can also see a chart breaking down your portfolio by company and AIC sector. Go to My portfolios to get started.   

Our Income finder tool allows you to see when dividends are paid for the investment trusts in your portfolios, or build portfolios that match your desired income profile (always remembering that dividends are not guaranteed).

No, you don't. You will need to create an account if you want to use certain features, for example when setting up personalised portfolios or email alerts.

You can find performance figures on each investment trust's 'Performance' tab (here's an example). Here you'll also find a charting tool which tracks each trust's performance over time and allows you to compare it to the trust's peer group or a comparative index.

If you want to access historical performance figures, you can do so using 'Advanced compare'. Past months can be selected from the drop down menu under the 'Specify date' tab. Monthly PDF reports can be found on our archive page here. 

Most of our investment trust data is provided to us by Morningstar in the form of a daily feed which includes NAVs, discounts, performance metrics and other portfolio and operational data. 

Stock exchange announcements come from RNS and PRN newswires with a delay of up to one hour. 

Company literature in the form of factsheets, semi-annual and annual reports is from FEFundInfo.

ESG policies are provided directly by investment trusts themselves.

Our daily data feed from Morningstar is uploaded to our website at 8.15am each business day. This data is from the market close the previous day.

Information on our website is updated daily. For investment trusts that invest in equities, the NAVs provided to us by Morningstar are the estimated NAVs of each investment trust as at the market close the previous day. This allows us to produce more accurate estimates of the discount or premium of each investment trust. 

Morningstar does not estimate NAVs for alternative asset investment trusts., Therefore the NAVs you will see will be the last ones reported by the investment trust, taking into account any adjustments for income/dividends or corporate actions. 

Due to licensing restrictions, we are unable to distribute most of our data in Excel format. However, you can download the following Excel files from our data archive: 

Industry overview provides a snapshot of the investment company industry at the end of each month. Assets are broken down by individual investment company or VCT, by AIC sector and by asset management group. 

AIC corporate activity shows all corporate actions going back over 15 years. These include block-listings, IPOs, new issues, allotments, tenders, listing changes and roll-overs. The data is updated monthly on a year-to-date basis. 

Monthly information releases (MIR) are intended for professionals and firms maintaining databases of investment company data. These files contain technical data on asset sizes, all NAV types, gearing, current period revenue, reserves, shares/treasury shares, cash and unlisted holdings, gearing ranges, geographic exposure and others.

Due to licensing restrictions, we are not able show performance data for FTSE or MSCI indices. Instead, we show Morningstar indices which are highly correlated with similar regional and size-weighted indices.

For example, for Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust we show the Morningstar Developed Markets index which is highly correlated with the more well known global equity indices. You'll see the performance for these Morningstar indices on the performance tab for each investment trust. We also list the fund manager's own benchmark at the top of the page for your reference (for example, FTSE All World TR GBP). 

A full list of ZDPs can be found here. Click the buttons at the top of the screen to access hurdles, yields and terminal asset values (TAVs).

As of October 2024, 3i Group had a market capitalisation of £30.9 billion, representing 15% of the investment company industry. That means that it has a large impact on our industry averages, especially the average industry discount, which is much narrower than would be the case if 3i was excluded. For the purposes of transparency, we have decided to provide average industry statistics excluding 3i Group alongside the standard industry average.