Investment Trust Discount Data

[jaizan]

I have been checking historical investment trust data & find in some cases, it's presented in a confusing or incorrect maner.

1 Morningstar
See first picture.
AAS is shown with a discount of 4.33% in 2013, when it is clearly actually a premium. Then the graph has lines for share price and NAV. The numbers don't correspond to actual price, being presumably rebased in some arbitrary way from 2010. These lines show a share price premium of 18%, but of course I should not calculate a premium in this way. Rebasing the graphs is not helpful.

2 Sharepad.
Second picture.
This is better, with a real share price & NAV graph. The premium in 2013 roughly matches the Morningstar 2013 figure. The table shows a current discount of 17.7%, which matches the graph. OK.

Third picture.
The ratio of price to NAV is on the LH scale. This looks mostly OK, except it has recently dropped below 60%, which means a discount of over 40%. This does not correspond with Sharepad info in picture 2. Am I missing something ?

The fourth picture shows VOF. Here the discount in the table bears no relationship at all to the graph.

[mc2fool]

1 Morningstar
See first picture.
AAS is shown with a discount of 4.33% in 2013, when it is clearly actually a premium. Then the graph has lines for share price and NAV. The numbers don't correspond to actual price, being presumably rebased in some arbitrary way from 2010. These lines show a share price premium of 18%, but of course I should not calculate a premium in this way.

Ok, firstly the 4.33% is a premium; if you roll the mouse over to, say, 2015 onwards you'll see that discounts are shown as negative numbers.

Secondly, what you are looking at is Morningstar's "growth" chart and, yes, the chart, for whatever period you choose, is rebased to (for some reason) 10K at the start. So, what the chart is showing is the change in price and NAV (and sectors) since the beginning of the period.

What you want to do is click on Chart Settings above the chart and change the Plot Type to Price. Then get rid of everything other than the price (dark blue) and the NAV (light green).

[DavidM13]

Many thanks!