Blue Planet Investment Management is an Edinburgh-based company that runs three investment trusts focused on the financial sector. One of these is the Blue Planet Financials Growth and Income Investment Trusts (numbers one to ten). These investment trusts were formally known as the Cairngorm Building Societies Investment Trusts (numbers one to ten) and were launched to take advantage of expected rationalisation of the building societies sector.

The unusual structure, with ten underlying trusts that are all identical, was created to benefit from building society conversions. One share in this investment trust is a unit in each of the ten underlying trusts.

As Mr Marsh points out, the recent performance of this investment trust has been impressive. Blue Planet Investment Management believes that sector specialisation is
the key to investment out-performance, and has chosen to focus on the financial sector, believing it will produce superior returns. As a result, these investment trusts invest exclusively in financial companies, principally banks, quoted on the world’s stock markets.

According to Blue Planet themselves, ‘specialising exclusively in the financial sector, we are more likely to generate returns in excess of those generated by broad-based market indices such as the S&P 500 or the FTSE Eurofirst 300’.

Having chosen the financial sector as their investment focus, the Blue Planet team then identify individual investment targets by analysing the prospects of different countries and their financial institutions. This analysis is used to rank countries and financial institutions by their expected future performance, and investments are made in those companies that are identified as offering the best future returns.

Further details on the investment process, performance of the investment trusts to date, and Blue Planet’s views on the financial services sector can be found at www.blueplanet.eu