You decided to buy an IT and stick with it thru thick and thin, knowing that there will be plenty of thin. During the thin periods you are getting more shares for your hard earned and therefore one day more dividends.
Your plan was to re-invest the dividends back into the share better if you could add more fuel to the fire but this example is for seed capital only.
If you started with 5k a hefty sum back in the days of yore, your 5k would be worth 50k, you have to allow for inflation and the current yield is 5%.
£2,500 p.a. a yield on your initial investment of 50%.
Or you may have chosen CTY or bought both as you wanted to sleep soundly in your bed.
Your investment would be worth 35k and the current yield is 4%.
£1,400 p.a. a yield on your initial investment of 28%.
Or you may have chosen LWDB
Your investment would be worth 55k and the current yield is 3.2%
£1,760 p.a. a yield on your initial investment of 32%.
All figures approximations only as prices change constantly.
Private investor Geoff Mills wins big – a 40-year journey of patience, process and trust in trusts
- 14 November 2025
- QuotedData
Private investor Geoff Mills scooped the £5,000 prize at the QuotedData Investors’ Choice Awards 2025 after correctly predicting the winners in every category from the judges’ shortlists. An investment trust investor since the 1980s, he has amassed fund selection skills to rival those of the professionals. We look at his journey from curious novice to investment trust champion.
Geoff’s early interest in investment trusts started in a familiar way. After university, he went to work for NatWest. He was dutifully saving into a cash account but soon realised it would take him years to build a meaningful pot of capital. He’d always had some curiosity about the stock market, and decided this was a better home for his spare cash.
His inspiration came from the personal finance section of his parents’ newspaper, the Observer, and its monthly supplement Money Observer. Edited by Jonathan Davies – who he still follows on the Money Makers podcast – the magazine famously touted investment trusts as ‘the City’s best kept secret’. He liked the idea that those in the know invested in investment trusts.
His early forays into investing were relatively cautious. He made monthly savings into two trusts – Alliance Trust for global exposure, and the Merchants Trust for the UK. Long before the era of investment platforms, he dutifully sent off his cheques in the post, kept reinvesting his dividends, and was delighted with the results.
The ’87 crash did not dent his commitment. In fact, it meant he learnt one of the most important investment lessons early on: “I was a bit nervous, of course, but I saw it as a big opportunity. When the investment trusts went down in value, I figured it would only be temporary and took advantage, investing more. I did the same during Covid,” he says.
“If you end up getting into a panic and selling, cut your losses and go into cash, you lose out. I just stuck with it, kept reinvesting the dividends and carried on.” This unemotional approach has served him extremely well over the years.
As time went on, the systems got better and more flexible. Soon he didn’t have to send cheques any more. He could wrap his investments in a PEP, and then an ISA. He could trade online, and at the touch of a button. He began to expand his knowledge, invest in a broader range of trusts and take some more risk around the edges.
He’s had some big winners over the years. One of his favourites has been Law Debenture. The unique structure allows fund managers James Henderson and Laura Foll maximum flexibility on their stock selection because the income is taken care of by the independent professional services business. This has been one of Geoff’s long-term holdings.
AVI Global has been another of his success stories: “I like the way they think, and how they focus on undervalued opportunities. I have a great respect for the team and it’s done very well.” He also bought into Temple Bar when Ian Lance took over the trust in 2020, and it has been a strong performer for him ever since. However, he has also had his misses. He admits that an investment in UK Greencoat Wind was a disappointment and eventually he sold out. Nevertheless, he says, “the winners exceed the losers by some margin.”
He’s also moved into some more esoteric areas, while maintaining diversified investment trusts at the core of his portfolio. For example, he now has Cordiant Digital Infrastructure, which holds a portfolio of digital infrastructure assets: “It’s an area you just can’t replicate in an open-ended fund,” he says. He also holds Seraphim Space, which invests in satellite technology. “These are great examples of what investment trusts can do and both of them are pretty cheap.”
He also holds a few private equity companies. He has held them for a long time, so has made good returns even if their recent performance has been choppier. He still holds Oakley Capital, and ICG Enterprise.
These days Geoff tends to look to the specialist press and research groups for ideas. He enjoys the Money Makers podcast, which interviews fund managers. He also uses QuotedData research and listens to its interviews. He likes Citywire Investment Trust Insider. He also makes extensive use of the AIC website: “It is very good. I use the data to monitor all my investments, see the dividend payments, dates and so on.”
He says the AIC’s site is perfect for those just getting started. “The best thing about all these resources is that they’re free!” This is one of the key reasons he likes investment trusts – he finds that the information is far better than he can get on open-ended funds. He finds he can gather lots of information, updates, investment commentary from investment company websites. “AVI Global, for example, has a monthly commentary, with real detail. It’s excellent. Other trusts could really learn from that. It tells me what they’re doing, exiting investments or considering new ones.”
AGMs are also a vital source of information. Now largely retired, he has even more time to go to more of them. He has been to a few where he is the only person there. He has got to know a few fund managers very well and has developed an acute radar for any obfuscation. He wants to see a manager and board that are well-briefed and can answer his questions properly. He will usually go with a list, and may even seek out the manager for a chat afterwards.
Importantly, he’s always swift to sell if he doesn’t get the answers he wants: “There are some trusts where they haven’t answered the questions properly. I’ve gone back and sold straightaway.”
Geoff is an investment trust loyalist. He has a couple of open-ended funds, but only when he can’t get the exposure in an investment trust form. “Investment trusts are 90% of my portfolio and those of my family.” He has even built something of a reputation among his friends, and is now entrusted with some of their savings pots as well.
Aberdeen Diversified ADIG leaves the Watch List after it return of cash.
The Snowball currently has £1,892.00 xd, when added to current cash of £460.00, to be invested in GCP and FSFL
Whilst all days are good days for a dividend investment plan, some days are better than others.
Dividends can be more reliable than share prices as they’re driven by
the companies performance itself and not by the whim of investors.
As part of a total return / reinvestment strategy, this income could be
reinvested into income assets or back into the equity market
depending on the relative valuations.
The emotional benefits of dividend re-investment.
In fact, with this investment strategy you can actually welcome falling share prices.
Bluefield Solar Income Fund Limited
(‘Bluefield Solar’ or the ‘Company’)
Unaudited NAV as at 30 September 2025
Bluefield Solar (LON: BSIF), the London listed UK income fund focused primarily on acquiring and managing solar energy assets, announces its net asset value (‘NAV’) as at 30 September 2025. Unless otherwise noted herein, the information provided in this announcement is unaudited.
The NAV as at 30 September 2025 was £675.0 million, or 114.00 pence per Ordinary Share (‘pps’), compared to the audited NAV of 116.56 pps as at 30 June 2025. This equates to a movement in the quarter of -2.20% and a NAV total return for the quarter of -0.31%.
| (pps) | |||||||
| Audited NAV as at 30 June 2025 | 116.56 | ||||||
| Power prices | 0.01 | ||||||
| REGO Update | -0.10 | ||||||
| Actual Generation vs Forecast | -0.16 | ||||||
| Grid Curtailments | -0.22 | ||||||
| Dividend Paid | -2.20 | ||||||
| Other movements | 0.11 | ||||||
| Unaudited NAV as at 30 September 2025 | 114.00 | ||||||
Power prices and Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (‘REGOs’)
The power curves available from the Company’s three leading independent power forecasters as at 30 September 2025 show electricity prices falling slightly in the near term with a modest increase in long-term forecasts. The near-term decline is principally attributed to stronger renewable capacity growth as the market seeks to achieve Clean Power 2030.
The portfolio is largely insulated from this downward pressure on account of the power price fixing strategy. Longer-term increases are a result of increased demand expectations resulting in a slight increase to the NAV. REGO prices were updated for the latest annual REGO curve, which has dropped from an average price of circa £1/MWh to £0.80/MWh for the period 2026 to 2030.
Actual Generation vs Forecast
Generation across the combined portfolio was slightly below forecast during the quarter, primarily due to reduced availability caused principally by turbine outages on two of the Company’s wind assets.
Grid Curtailments
Several assets within the portfolio experienced both planned and unplanned grid curtailments during the period. The most significant impact occurred at West Raynham (50MW), where a scheduled curtailment for grid update works kept the site offline throughout June and July.
Other Movements
Other movements reflect the change of the calculation date of cash flows from 30 June 2025 to 30 September 2025, along with tax, degradation, debt, and working capital adjustments.
Gearing
The Company’s UK holding companies and its subsidiaries have total outstanding debt of £572.0 million, with a leverage level of circa 45.9% of Gross Asset Value (30 June 2025: 45.7%).
Potential Changes to UK ROCs and FiTs Regimes
For information, please refer to the announcement on 7 November 2025:
Strategic Review and Commencement of Formal Sale Process
For information, please refer to the announcement on 5 November 2025:
Is it “different this time”, or are we in the mother of all bubbles? The economics of AI should give investors pause for thought, says Dan McEvoy
(Image credit: Getty Images)
By Dan McEvoy
published 5 days ago in Analyses
Questions about AI’s stock market dominance are being asked louder than ever. On 27 October, Wired published an article contending that “AI may not simply be ‘a bubble’ or even an enormous bubble. It may be the ultimate bubble.” The article included comments from Brent Goldfarb, co-author of Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation. Goldfarb said that the AI boom ticks every box he looks for in a technology-driven bubble: uncertainty over the ultimate end use, a focus on “pure play” companies, novice investor participation and a reliance on narrative.
As Edward Chancellor, financial journalist and former hedge-fund strategist, has pointed out in these pages, the AI bubble is also on shakier ground than many previous technology-driven bubbles, such as the dotcom bubble, the “Roaring Twenties” and the US railroad boom, all of which were followed by major economic depressions. It is also more speculative. Railways, cars and the internet were proven technologies in their bubble periods – the same cannot be said of self-teaching computers. The AI bubble is more “a multi-trillion-dollar experiment” to see if we can arrive at artificial general intelligence (AGI) – technology that successfully matches human levels of intelligence. If that experiment fails, we won’t have canals, railways or fibre-optic cables to show for it, but rather millions of obsolescing computer chips and dormant, debt-funded data centres.
AI as a field of research dates back at least to Alan Turing, and includes established fields such as machine learning and computer vision; generative AI is a newer subdivision that has taken shape over the last 15 years. It leapt to public attention – and brought the wider field along with it – with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. But it’s worth emphasising that if you are happy to buy Nvidia shares at current prices, you are effectively betting on the long-term profitability of generative (and its newer subset, “agentic”) AI, not the field as a whole. And even the bulls are nervous about the prospects for that. “AI… is driving trillions in spending over the next few years and thus will keep this tech bull market alive for at least another two years,” says Dan Ives, head of global technology research at Wedbush Securities. That is significant as Ives is one of the great tech bulls. If even he is implicitly conceding that the current bull market could end and suggesting a possible timeframe, it shows that doubt is creeping in.
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The nature of the AI bubble
“This time it’s different” is regarded as one of the most dangerous phrases in investing, but it’s a refrain that AI’s proponents turn to increasingly frequently. The companies driving AI today, they say, are highly profitable, unlike the proliferation of profitless internet start-ups in the dotcom era. That holds true of Nvidia as well as the “hyperscalers” (Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft), but none of these are profitable because of revenue generated by generative AI products. They were already highly profitable (and, for the most part, less capital-intensive) before the arrival of ChatGPT. No one denies there is money to be made selling computer chips or cloud computing. But AI is a different story.
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Step back and look at generative AI firms in isolation, and the current set-up looks a lot like the dotcom bubble. Venture capital is flooding into speculative businesses that burn through cash with no credible plans to turn that into profit any time soon. James Mackintosh of The Wall Street Journal observes that the dotcom bubble kept inflating between 1995-2000 despite media references to the bubble increasing every year throughout this period. Bubbles can keep growing, even if everyone knows they’re bubbles.
A bubble usually bursts after encountering some form of pin. No one knows what that will be for AI, but a contender is an energy-driven inflation crisis. AI requires vast amounts of energy. Policymakers can make life as easy as possible for AI developers, but they can’t control energy prices. The more advanced AI models become and the more users they acquire, the more energy they are likely to consume. And there are signs that AI is already making energy more expensive for US consumers. Bank of America deposit data shows that average electricity and gas payments increased 3.6% year-on-year in the third quarter of this year. Whether or not energy-driven inflation reaches a point where it poses headaches for US politicians, it doesn’t take much imagination to see it quickly becoming a problem for AI developers themselves.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman wants his firm to have 250 gigawatts (GW) of data-centre capacity by 2033. According to Bloomberg’s Liam Denning, that’s equivalent to about a third of peak demand on the US grid and more than four times all-time peak electricity demand for the state of California. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says 1GW of data-centre capacity costs $50 -billion – $60 billion to build (of which $35 billion or so goes on Nvidia’s chips), so building this could cost OpenAI north of $12 /trillion That simply it isn’t going to happen – certainly not in anything like the next eight years, at least – but the numbers show just how much energy AI’s biggest players are planning to consume.
Even with energy prices where they are, the economics are stretched thin for AI developers. OpenAI posted an operating loss of $7.8 billion in the first half of 2025, according to tech news site The Information. Annual recurring revenue is set to exceed $20 billion this year, but OpenAI’s own projections say it will not be cash flow positive until 2029, when it projects revenue of $125 billion. If the economics of scaling its capacity at pace ever start looking negative, then OpenAI’s semiconductor-spending binge could slow dramatically.
If you want an idea of how overblown the stock market’s reaction is to this binge, look no further than AMD (Nasdaq: AMD). On 6 October, OpenAI announced that it would buy up to 6GW of GPUs from AMD, which AMD executives estimated could net $100 billion in additional revenues once the ripple effects are factored in. Within two days of the announcement, AMD’s market capitalisation had increased by around $115 billion – more than the revenue the deal was expected to raise. That’s before getting into the fact that AMD will be paid for the GPUs not with money, but with its own stock.
Where are the benefits of AI?
Generative AI does at appear to be improving professional productivity. What data we currently have available from the US shows a trend of reasonably healthy GDP growth alongside subdued job creation, which Joseph Amato, president and chief investment officer at Neuberger, calls “an unusual combination that points to productivity doing more of the heavy lifting”. AI is expected to lift productivity in the US by 1.5% over the next ten years, and between 0.2%-1.3% across the G7. But Amato cautions that these gains are far from evenly distributed and that they pose risks of their own. “Lower-end white-collar roles – performing routine analysis or administrative tasks often filled by recent college graduates – face significant displacement risk,” he says. That has profound policy implications.
The AI revolution could eat itself. You can’t put an entire generation of the global middle class out of work without expecting substantial economic consequences; perhaps enough to negate all the potential GDP gains. There is evidence that this is already happening. Ron Hetrick, principal economist at workforce consulting firm Lightcast, observes that average real spending on retail goods compared with total employment has been stagnating ever since the housing bubble that led to the 2008 crash. Covid and the consequent stimuli disrupted this trend, but only temporarily: retail spend per employee is now falling again.
Hetrick calls AI “a jobs-destroying, money devouring technology” that threatens to accelerate this decline. As retail spending continues to fall, AI companies’ “large enterprise clients will also see their buyers stagnate”. If the world entered a recession, the core business pillars at Amazon, Google and Meta would take a major hit; advertising and e-commerce revenues are all ultimately reliant on a large crop of middle class consumers happily spending money. None of these companies has an AI division that is remotely profitable in its own right, let alone capable of supporting the wider business.
AI could deliver some genuinely world-changing social benefits, improved medical research being an obvious example. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold is a program that can predict the structure of a protein based on the sequence of amino acids that comprise it, which has profound implications for the research of diseases and development of treatments.
But two things need to be remembered: firstly, this isn’t particularly new: DeepMind debuted AlphaFold in 2018, so its potential ought to have been priced in before ChatGPT came along. These kinds of techniques are also not generative AI – researchers at the top biotechs are not asking ChatGPT to come up with new amino acid sequences for them, because that’s not how large language models work. More pertinently for investors, it is not a given that the medical applications will be profitable.
How to hedge your bets with AI
How can investors hedge their bets given these trends? Judicious selection of energy stocks is one way to play the increasing demand for power that AI companies will drive over the coming years. But this window may already have passed: Vistra (NYSE: VST), for example, has gained 60% in the past 12 months and now trades at 22 times forward earnings – which is a reasonable price for a tech stock, but looks steep based on traditional valuations for utilities. That said, if it does turn out to be energy inflation that eventually bursts the AI bubble, then the suppliers ought to catch the tailwinds in the process. An investment trust with exposure to companies powering and building data centres, such as Pantheon Infrastructure (LSE: PINT), can offer exposure to data-centre energy suppliers.
Or you could look for undervalued AI plays. Certain semiconductor stocks, such Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM), stand to continue benefitting from AI infrastructure spending for as long as it takes the bubble to burst, without the overblown valuations of the big US names.
Given TSMC’s effective monopoly on high-end chip manufacturing, it is well-placed to capitalise on whatever technological innovation might follow in AI’s wake if and when the bubble bursts.
Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, suggests some traditional defensive plays in order to hedge portfolios, including gold, government bonds, defensive shares in sectors such as consumer staples and healthcare, and multi-asset funds. “Finally, with policy rates still elevated, holding cash-like assets is no longer punitive,” he says. “The key is diversification: no single hedge works in every scenario, but a combination can cushion portfolios if AI euphoria fades.”
05 November 2025
Disclaimer
This is a non-independent marketing communication commissioned by Invesco. The report has not been prepared in accordance with legal requirements designed to promote the independence of investment research and is not subject to any prohibition on the dealing ahead of the dissemination of investment research.
Analysts view
BIPS uses the investment trust structure to maximise the potential in high-yield bonds.
Overview
Invesco Bond Income Plus (BIPS) is designed to offer an attractively high yield with a diversified, risk-conscious approach. The investment trust structure allows the manager, Rhys Davies, to invest in a diversified set of high-yield bond markets, including into some smaller and less liquid areas, and to boost the yield by taking on gearing rather than extra credit risk. Meanwhile, the ability for the board to build up revenue reserves makes it easier for it to provide a smooth income output (see Dividend).
Rhys can invest in high yield globally, but focusses on the UK and Europe, supplemented by the best ideas from Invesco’s large US-based credit teams. He runs a portfolio very diversified by issuer, and uses his and his team’s expertise in subordinated bank debt to provide a boost to the yield without taking excessive credit risk (see Portfolio). Currently, this allocation to subordinated financials is balanced by a large position in lower-yielding, investment-grade debt. Overall, Rhys is positioned cautiously, waiting for opportunities to take advantage when high valuations recede — as he did to good effect during the tariff tantrum of April 2025. Nonetheless, the portfolio yield is c. 7.5%, reflecting Rhys’ ability to generate income without leaning on credit risk. Board and manager agree a dividend target at the start of each year, with 2025’s 12.25p per share equivalent to an ongoing share price yield of 7.0%.
Strong demand for the shares means the trust has tended to trade on a premium for the past three years and the board has issued substantial amounts of shares to meet demand, which has contributed to BIPS having the lowest charges in its sector by some way. Nonetheless, the shares still trade on a small premium of 1.5% at the time of writing.
Analyst’s View
BIPS has strong credentials to be the first option considered for any high-yield bond allocation. It uses the features of the investment trust structure well to its advantage, providing an edge over open-ended funds or ETFs. Rhys doesn’t have to keep cash on hand for outflows, and so can remain fully invested. In fact, he tends to run with a geared position, boosting the yield and the capital growth potential. He also invests in more specialist and less liquid areas like subordinated financial debt and some small issue bond deals, providing off-benchmark allocations that passive options can’t. The annual dividend target provides some visibility on the yield, while revenue reserves provide some protection in the event that market yields fall. Invesco’s large credit teams in Europe and the USA allow Rhys to manage a broad and diversified portfolio with prudently managed issuer and geographical risks.
Rhys’s cautious outlook doesn’t prevent the trust from offering a high yield while also having some built-in beta to any price appreciation that would come from falling interest rates, with a duration of 3.8 as of the end of September. This interest rate sensitivity is spread across the three key geographies, and so if UK rates remain high while European and US rates continue to fall, the portfolio will still benefit. We think that, given how narrow credit spreads are right now, BIPS’s approach, which allows a high yield to be earned without leaning on credit risk, is highly attractive.
Bull
- Experienced and well-resourced team with international presence
- Risk-conscious approach could provide stability through tougher markets
- Attractive yield on offer with high average credit rating
Bear
- Gearing also magnifies losses in falling markets as well as gains in rising markets
- Income would come under pressure with any sustained fall in market yields (as it would for peers)
- Duration would lead to losses if rates were hiked
