Firstly a quote from my Fool post from two years ago:-
I have always been slightly sceptical about TER or anyone else that makes recommendations. Anyone making a recommendation has to make money to stay in business. Even 'Which' magazine always has a 'best buy', they don't say that nothing they looked at was up to the job. In the case of TER one of their revenue streams is their standard fee for reprints but companies are hardly going to order reprints when they don't get at least a mildly glowing review.
The recent TER report on Octopus Titan seems to be a more detailed review than we used to get a few years ago. It also provides a very good May 2013 explanation of Zenith. However, there are still areas which I don't like such as "Annual IRR post initial tax relief", espeically when the relief rate has changed over the years. I also note that TER is quite critical of the Titan charges but that only reduced that section's score to 7 out of 10, not much in the total which is out of 100.
In other words, it still looks good at 86/100 because they want to sell reprints. Although they say on the cover that this doesn't constitute advice, what do they expect us to make of an overall score or table 5's VCT performance comparison? Interesing to see that Titan is highest in table 5 of those fund-raising this tax year and have been chosen for this table. I assume that they say this isn't advice as they have not been authorised by the FCA since 26 March 2012.
By all means read TER and anything else you can get your hands on but only as part of DYOR.