I hold FCIT and Bankers, they are well spread global trusts. Performance has been satisfactory over many years. I don't care about disparaging remarks, holding them gives me a warm glow. CGT is an excellent trust, run by one of the best managers in the UK, although Peter Spiller is nearer the end of his career than the beginning. It is the type of investment you have been able to tuck away and not worry about, how many of those are there!

Come for the high fees and stay for the bad returns. What's not to like?

I think that's probably the answer TL as we've discussed before. They're low volatility as shown at the end of Q1 last year (-1.9%). However, with that comes very low return - a below inflation return?

4 positives though. It's not a negative return, they should hold up better during inflation/risk of interest rate rises, they should drop less during another 'market moment' and they're cheap.

I hold 30% of my SIPP in Vanguard's Global Short-Term Bond Index Fund - 0.15% on-going / 0.13% transactions costs. It tracks the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Ex US MBS 1-5 year index and includes global government, government-related agencies, corporate and securitised bonds and excludes US Mortgage Backed Securities from the universe of fixed income securities. Good blend of credit rating:

AAA (42.0%)
AA (15.3%)
A (20.7%)
BBB (18.1%)
NR (3.9%)

There's a cheaper Vanguard UK Short Term Investment Grade Bond Index Fund - 0.12% on-going costs / 0.02% transactions costs. It fell about 3.5% in the same period last year. To really confuse matters (as I've just discovered - hence the edit) it tracks the Bloomberg Barclays GBP Non-Government 1-5 Year 200MM Float Adjusted index and includes investment-grade bonds, excluding government bonds, denominated in UK pounds sterling, and applies a filter to exclude the smaller, more illiquid bonds from the universe of fixed income securities. Again a good blend of credit rating:

AAA (29.9%)
AA (14.5%)
A (19.8%)
BBB (34.8%)
NR (1.0%)

With such low returns in the offing, the UK fund (non-government bonds) is half the cost of the Global fund (which includes government bonds) and should be a consideration if you're looking at ST bonds.

For me holding the ST fund is a bit like putting your tight head in goal in a 5 a side game. Not going to move much and not much is going to dribble through during an onslaught! But having such a large and immovable object tying up one end it allows warfare at the other.

PS - I've edited the above because the 'UK' fund is only 30% UK bonds. Read the small print Mr B!!!
PPS - The latter fund has the shortened acronym UKSTIG (that I just made up). What more do you want?

Not much to add to this thread but it's interesting to read.

Can I ask though, unless I am mistaken Monks manager was appointed in 2015. So why are people looking at it's performance in 2008 as a comparison when it had a different manager and different mandate?

Is it not totally irrelevant? Maybe I've missed something but seems odd.

Not irrelevant in the context of the instigating post #163.
But I'd say comparing a 100% risk-on fund, to a fund with uppperbound multi-asset risk-on limit of 80% and more commonly much less, each with different mandates, is rather pointless.

Incidentally, what was Monks mandate in 2008?