Fund Objective

The Fund's investment objective is to provide capital growth and income.

View on Past Performance

Corporate bond prices fell along with global bond markets in general during the period amid growing concerns about tightened credit conditions, rising inflation, and the prospect of interest rate hikes.Companies boosted reserves through further capital raisings and investors contemplated the ongoing impact of the credit crisis ahead of company results and earnings forecasts.Growing inflationary pressures appeared to overshadow concerns of an economic slowdown, and the fund's performance fell along with the market.We continue to focus on selecting high quality corporate bonds issued by companies with strong credit ratings, which are better positioned to weather the storm during the current market volatility. We aim to achieve an optimum level of interest (or yield) for the lowest possible level of risk in the fund.

Future Expectations

Whilst we acknowledge that rising inflation creates a difficult environment for the Bank of England to reduce rates and corporate bond markets may be vulnerable to more shocks in the nearterm, in general, economic data continues to point to a deteriorating UK economy.If economic growth continues to weaken, we anticipate that the Bank will look beyond the near term elevated inflation level and reinitiate interest rate cuts over the longer term which should benefit good quality bonds.

Fund Details