I am feeling quite bruised by the takeover of Civitas Social Housing. Are there any lessons for investors? For example, if we feel that the directors were scaredy cats and that they should have encouraged more bidders to push the price up, are any of the directors also a director of any other investment trusts, of which we might now be wary? There is a crying need for more social housing, and the receipt of Government housing benefit should be a good covenant. Despite that should we avoid social housing? I had several holdings of Civitas and sold some in the market fractionally below 80p and one via HL where I accepted the offer. I am still waiting for the cash proceeds in the latter case and HL do not know when it will be received. Is that another lesson?

I see that an offer has been made for Civitas Social Housing. The price has surged to about 80p, but this is still at a discount to the NAV of 110p. While I welcome the rise in price I am in two minds about agreeing to the offer which, in my case, means selling at a loss and also losing an attractive yield. It looks as though it is a done deal so small shareholders will have to lump it. What do others think?

Would it be possible to add a search facility to the Back Copies section of this site? Then one could search, perhaps within a given time period, for a particular investment trust or a topic.

Civitas Social Housing has been in the news because one of its tenants, My Space, has been criticised by its regulator and now is in arrears with rent due to Civitas, whose price is now on a 52% discount to NAV. The My Space rent represents only 1.3% of Civitas's rent roll which suggests that the sell-off has been overdone. Is Civitas Social Housing now a buy?

I hope you can access this.

In today's Times there is an article by Patrick Hosking, Financial Editor, entitled "Investment trusts face a test of value and many are failing". It talks first about RIT Capital Partners and the discount to which it has fallen and attributes it to the increasing proportion of its portfolio invested in assets for which there is no independent market price, eg venture capital, private equity, unlisted stocks etc. The article goes on to refer to investment trusts with illiquid assets such as property, wind farms and song catalogues. Where assets have to be valued by a discounted cash flow method the NAV is dependent on a choice of discount rate. Hosking ends by saying that NAVs need to be "kept up-to-date and reflect reality".

TwentyFour Income is the largest trust in the AIC Structured Finance sector. It has offered to buy back shares at 2% below NAV. It is currently on a discount of 3.4%, the lowest in its sector, and is yielding 7%. As I invest for income I would like to keep the shares but should I be concerned about the effect of increasing interest rates on the company's financing costs and the safety of its dividend?

The Times wrote about Civitas Social Housing in the Business Section on 1 July. It recommended "Avoid". The reasons were concerns around the security of the income stream with the three leading tenants accounting for more than half the company's rental income. This may explain the substantial discount on the shares.

There was a very positive write up on PHP in The Times on Thursday. The headline was "Healthy returns from this property investment trust", but despite that description PHP does not appear to be listed on the AIC website (although it does feature in the news section). I believe it is not included in the latest ITN Statistical Supplement, although it may have been in the past. For an investment trust with a market value of £1.8 billion it seems to keep a rather low profile.

The comment about Tetragon in the latest ITN rang bells with me. I hold Tetragon shares through interactive investor who, on 23 December, told me that I had until 27 December to tell them if I wished to vote (but they are non-voting shares) at the AGM on 31 December. You will not be surprised to learn that I had other things to attend to on those dates so did not take part in the AGM. If the management of a quoted company wanted to avoid contentious discussion at an AGM it would be hard to find more suitable timing than the day chosen by Tetragon. If anybody managed to attend the AGM it would be interesting to hear what happened.

That was the headline of a commentary in The Times business section last week. Mercuriadis has done a deal with Blackstone, who have very deep pockets, to bring them music rights deals which he is already doing for Hipgnosis Songs. Is this a conflict of interest?

I bought shares in Tetragon in 2017 when they were on a substantial discount but their performance in their sector had been good. Since then the discount has grown and the relative performance has declined. Shares in Tetragon are non-voting so shareholders have no ability to press the Board or the investment managers to take any action which would improve the price. There have in the past been tender offers to buy shares back but they have had little impact on the share price. I am left wondering whether the managers have the right incentive to reduce the discount as, at the moment, shareholders would clearly benefit from a winding up.

Ian Cowie's column in the Money Section of the Sunday Times last Sunday talked about the importance of sustainable income for pension investments and gave a list of 12 investment trusts that met certain criteria, namely a yield of more than 3.1%, increasing the yield by more than 3.1% per annum over the last five years and holding cash reserves equal to at least one year's payouts. While I agree with his recommendation of investment trusts for pension investment I was not so sure about some of the trusts on his list. Some are quite small, two having a market cap of less than £100 million. If 1% of Cowie's readers were to buy them they would quickly go to a premium. More to the point I avoid trusts with a small market cap as I cannot be sure there will be buyers should I decide to sell. Until now I have used a cutoff point of £100 million but am considering raising it. Lindsell Train is one of the trusts on the list. I see that the trust has 46% of its assets in Lindsell Train Limited, its management company. This makes me uncomfortable as, although Lindsell Train has had a strong record in the past, a significant holding in a management company could lead to increased price volatility.

I recently received our Costs and Charges Statement for 2020 from interactive investor. These statements are rather new and I was not sure how to use them. They give a net return figure for each holding. However, my objective is reliable and increasing income and the net return does not include dividends so is not very useful for me. I then looked at the Product Costs, to be distinguished from the Service Costs, which are paid to ii. The majority were between 1 and 2%. The ones below 1% gave me a warm glow, eg Merchants at 0.54%, and some of these were helped by their size (Finsbury Growth and Income 0.73%, City of London 0.83%, Bankers 0.96%). The middle category (1-2%) seemed to raise a number of questions. Alliance at 1.02% seems reasonable but then why is Witan, which has also outsourced its fund management, 1.61%? And surely Scottish Mortgage at 1.01% should be lower in view of its enormous size! I would expect trusts which have physical assets to manage (property, infrastructure, renewables) to have higher costs, such as GCP Infrastructure (1.30%) and HICL Infrastructure (1.23%), so Bluefield Solar has done well at 1.09%. Why is Henderson Far East Income 1.90% when Henderson International Income is 1.06%? Why is JPMorgan Global Emerging Markets Income 1.66% when Murray International is 1.08%? At the high end I have HG Capital at 5.01%. I guess one should expect private equity to have a high cost reflecting the very hands-on management required. I have seldom paid much attention to costs when making investments. Should I in future?