Respite for investors trapped in Neil Woodford’s Income Focus fund as they are told they will be able to access their money
Investors trapped in Neil Woodford’s Income Focus fund will finally be able to access their money.
Savers in the fund, which is now being managed by Aberdeen Standard Investments, will be allowed to start placing buy and sell orders today at noon.
Renamed the LF ASI Income Focus, it will officially reopen tomorrow at midday.
Savers in Neil Woodford’s Income Focus fund, which is now being managed by Aberdeen Standard Investments, will be allowed to start placing buy and sell orders today at noon
Any orders placed between today and then will be calculated at the share price on noon tomorrow.
Link Fund Solutions, which supervises the management of the fund, suspended it last October after its manager Woodford resigned.
Now worth £251million, it has lost investors 26 per cent of their money since its launch in April 2017.
Anyone who pulls money out this week will crystallise a heavy loss, and Aberdeen hopes many investors will remain.
Since it was appointed to run the fund, it has moved savers’ money out of the more hard-to-sell stocks which Woodford had chosen and into liquid stocks ‘which we believe will drive sustainable income and capital growth’, it said.
The top ten holdings now include bus company National Express, packaging firm Mondi, OneSavings Bank and travel firm Tui.
Last month, savers in the larger Woodford Equity Income fund began to get money back after being trapped in it since last June.
That fund was not considered salvageable by Link, after it fired Woodford from running it in October, and is being wound up, with some facing losses of up to 40 per cent.