There are more than 26,000 investment funds available to UK investors today, yet the average UK investor has just six funds of any kind in their investment portfolio. Clearly, then, investors must be filtering out a lot of potential investments before they make a decision, and an obvious way to do this is by choosing an appropriate sector - but here too, there is a somewhat daunting range to choose from. The AIC announced yesterday an “overhaul” of its sectors, in order that they are as “clear and helpful as possible” for investors, and there are now more than fifty of them to choose from. In our view, this move by the AIC recognises that investors are using labels to search for funds - and the more granular those labels are, the more likely investors are to find them useful; so full marks for effort. But examination of the 300 trusts that now sit in those sectors highlights a challenge which still remains; however refined a sector label is - many trusts don’t sit easily among their peers. This presents a problem. Filtering funds by sector helps see the wood for the trees, which is essential given the great ‘taiga’ we face as investors seeking one tree among 26,000. But it also means many investors routinely overlook great funds just because they sit in the ‘wrong sector’. The only way to really work out where these trusts are is hard graft - real analysis at a fund level. The good news is that, for investors who have the time to search for them, trusts like this often trade on a wider discount than might otherwise be the case, presenting an opportunity. The even better news is that we’ve done the legwork to find eight of them, so you don’t have to.