How is “The People's Trust” not just another Investment Trust?
"According to what little information is available currently, this fund is most akin to an actively managed exchange traded fund rather than an investment trust. An investment trust is an actively managed, closed-end fund that is tradeable on the stock market.  ""Closed-end"" means that there are a fixed number of shares available for trading, so if you wish to buy or sell shares in a closed-end fund you need to find someone willing to sell or buy shares.  ""Actively managed"" means that the assets are selected by the fund managers in the belief that they will perform well.  This is in contrast to a ""passively managed"" fund which simply tracks an underlying index.   The closed-end nature of investment trusts means that the share price is not well correlated to the value of the underlying assets.  Indeed, almost all UK investment trusts trade at a significant discount to their net asset value.  This reflects their historic poor performance and relatively weak liquidity.  Of course there are some exceptions to this. Examples of open-end funds are unit trust (US = mutual funds) and ETFs (exchange traded funds).  They are ""open-end"" funds in the sense that the number of shares/units available will change according to demand.  Most importantly, the price of a share/unit will be strongly correlated to the net asset value of the underlying portfolio.  In general, for an open-end fund, if the net asset value of the fund is X and there are Y shares/units outstanding, then the price of a share/unit will be X/Y.  Historic data shows that passively managed funds (index trackers) ""always"" outperform actively managed funds in the long term.  One of the big issues with actively managed funds is they have relatively high management fees.  The Peoples Trust will be charging about 1% with a promise that this should come down over time.  Compare this to a fee of 0.05% on a large, major market index tracking ETF.  Further, the 1% headline fee being touted by Peoples Trust is a somewhat misleading, since they are paying their employees bonuses with shares in the fund.  This will cause dilution of the net asset value per share and can be read as addition management fees by proxy.  Since competent fund managers will demand high incomes, bonus shares could easily double the management fees, depending on the size of the fund. In summary, history has shown that the promises of active fund managers rarely (if ever) come to fruition. Personally, I would not consider this to be an attractive investment and would look more towards a passively managed major market index ETF with low management fees." "Well the People's Trust's IPO prospectus is now (2017-09-08) available for all to read (or there's a smaller ""information leaflet"").  (May need some disclaimers to be clicked to get access).  Both have a ""highlights"" bullet-point list: Coverage here has a comment thread with some responses by the founder attempting to answer the obvious objection that there's other multi-manager trusts on a discount (e.g Alliance Trust on ~ -5.5%), so why would you buy this one on a (very small) premium?  (Update: There's also another recent analysis here.) Personally, I'm thinking the answer to the original question ""How is The People's Trust not just another Investment Trust?"" is pretty much: ""it's just another Investment Trust"" (albeit one with its own particular quirks and goals).  But good luck to them."
The reason for such differences is that there's no source to get this information. The companies do not (and cannot) report who are their shareholders except for large shareholders and stakes of interest. These, in the case of GoPro, were identified during the IPO (you can look the filings up on EDGAR). You can get information from this or that publicly traded mutual fund about their larger holdings from their reports, but private investors don't provide even that. Institutional (public) investors buy and sell shares all the time and only report large investments. So there's no reliable way to get a snapshot picture you're looking for. "Who's ""they""? The brokerage is incorporated in Cyprus, which is known to harbor illegal/unethical financial firms (and for Russian money laundering). It's not easy to regulate unfortunately.   As a side-note, they're obviously targeting football fans to attract all the bookies guys and sports gamblers. Sad to see..." "Bloomberg suggests that two Fidelity funds hold preferred shares of Snapchat Inc.. Preferred shares hold more in common with bonds than with ordinary stock as they pay a fixed dividend, have lower liquidity, and don't have voting rights. Because of this lower liquidity they are not usually offered for sale on the market. Whether these funds are allowed to hold such illiquid assets is more a question for their strategy document than the law; it is completely legal for a company to hold a non-marketable interest in another, even if the company is privately held as Snapchat is. The strategy documents governing what the fund is permitted to hold, however, may restrict ownership either banning non-market holdings or restricting the percentage of assets held in illiquid instruments. Since IPO is very costly, funds like these who look to invest in new companies who have not been through IPO yet are a very good way of taking a diversified position in  start-ups. Since they look to invest directly rather than through the market they are an attractive, low cost way for start-ups to generate funds to grow. The fund deals directly with the owners of the company to buy its shares. The markdown of the stock value reflects the accounting principle of marking to market (MTM) financial assets that do not have a trade price so as to reflect their fair value. This markdown implies that Fidelity believe that the total NPV of the company's net assets is lower than they had previously calculated. This probably reflects a lack of revenue streams coming into the business in the case  of Snapchat. edit: by the way, since there is no market for start-up ""stocks"" pre-IPO my heart sinks a little every time I read the title of this question. I'm going to be sad all day now :(." I think it's because there are people who build entire wealth-gain strategies around certain conditions.  When those conditions change, their mechanism of gaining wealth is threatened and they may take a short term loss as they transform their holdings to a new strategy. "My teacher always says the property interest the beneficiary ""holds"" or ""possesses"" is an equitable interest.  I might just seem out of place here because it's a legal term and probably not commonplace outside that sphere. But the beneficiaries equitable interest is possessed or held in that regard. From this equitable interest is the income stream.   If that just seems like a bunch of gibberish to you than don't mind me, just trying to learn the ins and outs of trusts not the world of finance generally." "So how does one of these get set up exactly? If a private company wants to backstop their ability to repay bond obligations with public funds, doesn't an agreement like that have to go through something like a city council meeting before it's approved? If it does, and that happened in these cases, then the municipalities made a bad decision on an ""investment"" that included some level of risk, just like any other investment they make. If it doesn't work out, it shouldn't be a surprise who's on the hook for the payment." There are lots of thing that people will pay for if you wait long enough.  I don't know that I would consider them investments, but they go up in value. "It's a matter of social policy. The government wants people to make long term investments because that would lead to other long-term government goals: employment, manufacturing, economical growth in general. While speculative investments and day-trading are not in any way discouraged, investments that contribute to the economy as a whole and not just the investor are encouraged by the lower tax rates on the profits. While some people consider it to be a ""fig leaf"", I consider these people to be populists and dishonest. Claiming that long term social goals are somehow bad is hypocrisy. Claiming that short-term trading contributes to the economy as a whole is a plain lie." "Look at the Calvert Funds. They have a variety of ""socially responsible"" funds with published selection standards. Beware of mixing personal politics with business." know GIPS, basic portfolio theory / allocation, stocks / bonds.  Honestly most of the stuff in private wealth management isn't that complex and banks tend to be ultra conservative, so expect boring work of holding bonds till maturity, SPY's, JNJ's, GE's, JPM's etc. In the US, pension benefits promised by employers are tightly regulated by a law called ERISA. One of the requirements is that money be deposited in a trust that is out of the reach of the employer and the employer's creditors, so even if the employer falls on hard times or goes bankrupt, the money to pay the pensions is still there. In addition, the benefits are guaranteed by the federal government through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (usually called the PBGC). Relative to most investments, pensions are a safe bet. Private investors as mutual funds are a minority of the market.  Institutional investors make up a substantial portion of the long term holdings.  These include pension funds, insurance companies, and even corporations managing their money, as well as individuals rich enough to actively manage their own investments.   From Business Insider, with some aggregation:   Numbers don't add to 100% because of rounding.  Also, I pulled insurance out of household because it's not household managed.  Another source is the Tax Policy Center, which shows that about 50% of corporate stock is owned by individuals (25%) and individually managed retirement accounts (25%).   Another issue is that household can be a bit confusing.  While some of these may be people choosing stocks and investing their money, this also includes Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) and company founders.  For example, Jeff Bezos owns about 17% of Amazon.com according to Wikipedia.  That would show up under household even though that is not an investment account.  Jeff Bezos is not going to sell his company and buy equity in an index fund.   Anyway, the most generous description puts individuals as controlling about half of all stocks.  Even if they switched all of that to index funds, the other half of stocks are still owned by others.  In particular, about 26% is owned by institutional investors that actively manage their portfolios.   In addition, day traders buy and sell stocks on a daily basis, not appearing in these numbers.  Both active institutional investors and day traders would hop on misvalued stocks, either shorting the overvalued or buying the undervalued.   It doesn't take that much of the market to control prices, so long as it is the active trading market.  The passive market doesn't make frequent trades.  They usually only need to buy or sell as money is invested or withdrawn.  So while they dominate the ownership stake numbers, they are much lower on the trading volume numbers.   TL;DR:  there is more than enough active investment by organizations or individuals who would not switch to index funds to offset those that do.  Unless that changes, this is not a big issue. Well, I believe some would argue that the governing structures are somewhat different, as a king is basically the top of an aristocracy, and a representative government is supposedly invested by a popular mandate to act as stewards of the people.  It's a polite fiction governments maintain, these days. "They're not at all the same. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment method that pays off early investors with deposits from later ones. Fractional reserve banking is the practice of keeping only a fraction of a bank's demand deposits on reserve, while lending out the rest.  The reserve requirement is how central banks limit the amount of money that can float around in commercial banks. In the latter case, there is no ""later investor"" somewhere down near the bottom of a money food chain.  Every dollar, regardless of whether it was created fresh from one of the federal reserve banks or created via several chained loans, is worth the same.  If the dollars depreciate for whatever reason, they do so for everyone. Now, if you want a good example of a Ponzi scheme that is actually legal, look at Social Security. Edit: A ""debt-based society"" is separate from fractional-reserve banking.  If the Fed creates $1,000,000, the total amount of money that can float around is still capped based on whatever the reserve requirement is.  (For a 10% reserve requirement, it's something like $10,000,000.)  We have unsustainable debt increases because of lack of self-control on the part of our leaders.  The fractional-reserve process helps it along, but it's not the culprit.  It's an enabler." An investment trust is quoted just like a share. You just compare what you paid (your book cost) with its current share price, not the NAV, as a trust's price can be at a premium greater than the actual share price or a discount.