British Empire Trust (BTEM) has a highly-active, benchmark agnostic portfolio of global equities that follows a value-orientated investment approach. The trust differs from most global funds due to the types of companies that it focuses on, which can broadly be split into three buckets: family-controlled holding companies, closedended funds and asset-backed special situations – and all of those companies have the common feature of owning portfolios of businesses or assets, either listed or unlisted, that can be independently valued. Manager Joe Bauernfreund, chief executive and chief investment officer of AVI, is supported by four analysts and has solely responsible for the portfolio since October 2015 (though Joe has worked on the portfolio since 2002). He honed the investment process at the time and this has been a major contributor to the trust’s recent outperformance. Though it has a strong long-term track record (having more than doubled the returns of its peers and the MSCI AC World index over 20 years to the end of December), it struggled in the years following the global financial crisis due to the underperformance of value stocks and the trust’s historic underweight to the US market. However, when Joe assumed sole responsibility for the portfolio, he honed the process, concentrating the portfolio and increasing exposure to stocks where there is a specific event or catalyst for value to be realised. Since October 2015 to the end of 2017, the trust’s NAV total returns have been 64% - meaning it has comfortably outperformed its average peer, the MSCI AC World index and its own benchmark, the MSCI AC World ex USA index over that time. Though much of that outperformance was generated in 2016 (a year when value investing made a brief return to form following a prolonged period of doldrums), the trust managed to outperform the MSCI AC World index over the course of 2017 with NAV returns of 14.9% despite a clear style headwind owing to the team’s stockpicking and recent increased exposure to Japan.