Aurora Investment Trust (ARR) sits in the UK All Companies sector and aims to offer long-term returns through capital and income growth. Phoenix Asset Management was awarded the management contract in 2016, with Gary Channon as manager. He employs a high-conviction and deep value approach, creating a highly concentrated portfolio of 15–20 stocks. Gary is a long-term value investor, with the selection of companies being entirely bottom-up, following an in-depth research process. Gary and his team like to have “encyclopaedic knowledge” of the companies they hold, meaning a huge amount of time goes into analysis before investing. They only back management teams that they trust, and they never pay more for shares than 50% of what they think a business is worth. Phoenix was appointed after generating outstanding returns on its openended Phoenix UK Fund, and have more than doubled the returns of the FTSE All-Share from launch in 1998 to July 2020. However, since Phoenix took over ARR, it has significantly underperformed the benchmark in a challenging period for value investing. Up until 16 August, the trust has generated NAV total returns of 15.4%, compared to c. 24% for the FTSE All-Share. The volatile markets of the last six months have seen valueorientated portfolios being particularly badly hit, and as a result ARR has underperformed the benchmark, losing 32.5% while the benchmark is down 20.4%. The board pays a dividend and currently ARR yields 2.9%. ARR has proven popular with investors, having grown from £15 million of net assets in 2016 to the current £123 million (as at 14/08/2020) through share issuance.