Overview

City of London Investment Group PLC

City of London Investment Group PLC is an established asset management group which has built its reputation, with an institutional client focus, by specialising in emerging market closed-end fund investment. In recent years the Group has by way of diversification successfully added natural resource and developed market strategies to its product range. City of London operates its business from offices in London, the US, Singapore and Dubai.

CoL Diversification

Closed-end Funds - The Original Expertise

A closed-end fund (or an investment trust or company) is one with a fixed number of shares outstanding, and one which does not redeem shares in the way an open-ended one (such as a mutual fund or unit trust) does. The price of a share in a publicly traded closedend fund is determined entirely by supply and demand, so shares can either trade below their net asset value ("at a discount") or above it ("at a premium"). It is this characteristic that we seek to exploit, buying those shares we consider cheap, generally at what we believe to be an unjustifiable discount, and selling those we consider expensive, those at an unwarranted small discount or at a premium.

Emerging Markets - The First Application of Our Expertise

Emerging Markets as a description of young high growth economies first appeared in 1981 when only six such markets (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) could be accessed by foreign investors. Today there are almost 60, including the 'frontier' markets that are at earlier stages of development, with the largest being the socalled BRIC's economies – those of Brazil, Russia, India and China. City of London realised early on that institutional investors were struggling to access these markets in a professionally managed, risk-diversified way and that a product focused on the closed-end funds run by specialist managers could hold great appeal.

Natural Resources - A Core Sector for Closed-end Funds and Emerging Markets

The global natural resources sector has been a key focus for investing in both closed-end funds and emerging markets for many years. It is a sector we have always understood and researched, making it one of the first choices for beginning to diversify the Group's product range. Our investment activity in emerging markets brings us detailed knowledge of a whole range of resources from oil and gas, metals, minerals and diamonds to grain, coffee and cocoa, and forestry. With end-user economies generally 'resource-poor' in many commodities, we believe the long term prospects for investment products in this area to be attractive.