Contrarian: Events at SVM could be wake-up call for IT sector

One could be forgiven for feeling slightly more optimistic about the future of the investment trust sector after a number of key corporate battles in recent months.

Not least Alliance Trust successfully seeing off its corporate raiders, which has helped engineer a significant tightening in its share price discount to just 5%. But then comes rather grim news from another Scottish fund manager, this time SVM, led by Colin McLean. We learnt SVM Global’s fund manager, veteran Donald Robertson, had resigned from SVM Asset Management and “has been granted a leave of absence with immediate effect”. Obviously a number of factors seemed to be at work, not least the fact over the past five years, NAV has declined by 27% against a rise of 21% in the FTSE World...