Since 2008, the small cap., value and income segment has been a great place to be and Athelney Trust has done particularly well to be in exactly the right spot. Not so in 2018, however, with disappointing trading statements, company results and cut dividends far more common than I would have liked. Such statements were often accompanied by share price falls of the order of 25-40 per cent with sellers unable to trade with the market-makers unwilling to take stock on to their book.

Thank goodness for the relative stability provided by the Trust’s 25 per cent commercial and residential property content. Nevertheless, the total return for the six months ended 30 June was minus 4.1 per cent whereas the FTSE Small Cap Index (which contains a much larger proportion of growth companies than does the ATY list of holdings) fell by only 1.6 per cent in the same period. Global and US shares peaked in January: apart from the tech stocks, they have yet to regain that high ground or even particularly close to it. Again, the shares in the World Index with the greatest exposure to China are where they were at the January top but those with the greatest exposure to developed markets are down by 5.5 per cent. The pattern is the same over the full period since President Trump took over. In the US, exporters have beaten domestic operators by 11 percentage points while, in the developed world, those exposed to China have won by 15. It does not seem to me that international investors are taking this trade skirmish between the US and China nearly seriously enough.