F&C Investment Trust (FCIT) offers investors a highly diversified, multi-manager approach to global equity investing. FCIT’s manager, Paul Niven, leverages both BMO’s own internal strategies as well as what he believes are best-in-class external managers, including a significant allocation to private equity. Paul’s role is not merely to select delegated managers, but also to modify overall exposures in accordance with his own views. Over the last 12 months Paul has made a number of changes to FCIT, cutting exposure to growth styles and emerging markets in favour of more value-oriented strategies. This is a reflection of his view that stock-picking will increasingly be rewarded, but also reflects the potential reversal of the historical outperformance of growth stocks over value. We cover FCIT’s portfolio, and the economic events which are shaping Paul’s view, in more detail in our Portfolio section. FCIT’s Performance has been strong over the last 12 months, generating an NAV total return of 20.8% and beating both its benchmark and peers, thus resulting in FCIT being the third best-performing trust within the AIC Global peer group. Paul comments that FCIT’s performance reflects a market environment that is more suitable for a broad-based approach to equity investing, rather than being led by the narrow group of growth stocks which have supported FCIT’s more concentrated peers. FCIT’s most recent Dividend marks its 50th straight year of consecutive dividend increases – one of the longest records of any investment trust – and the board remains committed to its future growth. FCIT continues to trade on a Discount (which is currently 7.5%), a situation that has persisted since the COVID-19 crash in 2020.