In the current highly volatile investment climate investors once again turned to the glitter of gold rather than the lure of crypto currencies, with gold reaching a six year high of $1,540 an ounce and bitcoin declining to $10,000 as nervous investors looked for a safe haven. Gold is up by 6% over the last month and 30% in the last year as the US/China trade dispute, lower growth prospects for world trade and concerns on the state of the US economy with the US Federal Reserve considering a further cut to interest rates.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has lowered its growth forecasts for the global economy for both this year and next year as a result of trade and technology tensions. Global growth is forecast at 3.2 percent in 2019, picking up to 3.5 percent in 2020 (0.1 percentage point lower than in the earlier April projections for both years). The major world markets as represented by the MSCI World Index and the S&P 500 were under pressure in August with the indices declining by 2.2% and 1.8% respectively. Performance in the UK market was overshadowed by politics with the FTSE 100 Index declining by 5.0% while the Small Cap Index declined by only 3.2%. The Fledgling Index was not as badly affected, declining by 2.9% while the AIM All Share Index was the worst performing index, declining by 6.2% during the month. Our portfolio declined by 2.9% during the month which, after allowing for expenses resulted in a 3.1% decline in the NAV. The positioning of the portfolio has to a large extent been completed with a few, smaller names to be sold as we were unable to find buyers for these illiquid stocks. Our position in Greene King, Menzies (John), Latham (James) and Heath Samuel were sold while we added Smart Metering Services and Boohoo to the portfolio.