After years of upheaval and boardroom struggles, most investors in Alliance Trust would doubtless welcome a return to its core principles of picking growth stocks and raising its dividend.
The £3 billion investment trust has made quite significant progress in its efforts to do just that this year. It received backing from its shareholders in February to buy back the 19.75 per cent stake owned by Elliott Advisors, the activist investment group that had laid seige to its boardroom for several years after first taking a holding in 2012.
It was a symbolic end to one of the trust’s most tumultuous periods.
Alliance was formed in 1888 in a merger of three mortgage and land-owning companies in Dundee. It still has its headquarters there but