Henderson Smaller Companies Trust Share Price (HSL)

6th largest holding up almost 70% today

I do not invest here. I hold Henderson High income and it has done well for me. What I would say about this trust is that it is really just the index. And that it has just about performed the same, perhaps slightly worse than the MSCI index (which has not been a good place to be for the last 5 years). If you go on to their website, and look at the full portfolio, you will see that it contains 109 different companies, all in similar weightings. The largest holdings are around 2% each. This fund is close to an ETF in my opinion, and is more suited to someone who wants to take very minimal risk, but in return is willing to accept meagre gains. It has a 3.1% yield which as grown, and is not trading at much of a discount again probably because it is so vanilla.

Small caps are likely to do well over the next few months (hopefully years), so this could be a nice place to have some money now, however personally I think there are so many of these trusts, and many with better yields, why not go for DIVI for example which looks very similar.

As a small caps trader, I wouldn't consider many of the companies in this fund to be small caps. Many are in the 300M range, so again HHI is probably a better choice as you are getting a 6%+ yield there and some FTSE out performance. If you want to dial up the risk, and go a bit more of a concentrated / high conviction trust. Some of those have made fantastic gains last year.

Yeah the HSL seems pretty mediocre, but it probably has its place in a risk averse portfolio with a long term outlook.

Anyone owning this should write to Henderson’s and complain about the performance, the numbers over virtually all time frames are atrocious. 5 year numbers show 18% vs 56% for index. It is this dreadful performance that makes investors switch to index funds. Henderson’s should replace Herman asap

Hargreaves Lansdown give a dividend cover of 1.13

This money give a dividend cover of 1.55

6 consecutive down days.