De-equitisation refers to the shrinking of the amount of public market equities in issue through share buybacks and M&A. It’s a trend which means many investors are looking to find ways to invest in the parallel world of private investments. Among other things, investors are attracted by two features of private investments: the very different types of companies that have not yet made it to public markets; and the potentially strong returns that have been captured by the early backers of some well publicised unicorns. But accessing private markets is rather harder than investing in public equity funds. As a result, those investment trusts that do offer exposure to private market investments are in hot demand, and currently rank amongst the highest rated investment trusts in that universe. The selections below all have a significant proportion of their assets in growth equities and have an average premium to NAV of 17.6%.
