“What a difference a quarter makes”, as Dinah Washington’s accountant used to sing. When last we updated on our investment trust picks for 2020 at the end of March, it is fair to say that collective optimism was thin on the ground. However, we all retained ultimate conviction in our selections (or else had grown so despairing at the market environment that we had settled into a kind of other-worldly fatalism), keeping faith that our initial logic had been ultimately sound. This has proved a good decision, with widespread rallies in financial markets and strong performance subsequently from the majority of our investment trust picks. All it took was a little optimism and long-termism from us, not to mention untold trillions of stimulus from governments and central banks around the world. It is fair to say that whoever wins this competition at the end of the year will be primarily thanking Jay Powell… Indeed, so strong has been the rally that two of us are actually in profit for 2020, without – even indirectly – enriching Elon Musk (thus meeting your author’s definition of an ethical investment). We can see below the contrast between Q1 and Q2 returns. They say understatement is a billion times better than exaggeration, so suffice to say there have been some fairly large divergences between the two quarters! And yet some discount opportunities seem to remain, with an average discount of 23.4% across our picks (albeit skewed somewhat by the massive 61.3% discount on Tetragon).