At a time when stock markets are in turmoil and investors don’t know which way to turn, it’s reassuring to know that there are a number of investment funds out there that each have more than 100 years’ experience of managing private investors’ money.

These are the oldest-standing investment trusts, more than a dozen of which were founded in the 19th century. The daddy of them all is Foreign & Colonial, founded in 1868 to help ‘the investor of modest means’ have ‘the same advantage as the large capitalist’.

It has weathered every financial and political crisis from the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century to the dot.com crash at the turn of the twenty-first, so its managers are unlikely to be phased by the latest bout of market turbulence.

The same goes for Dunedin Income Growth trust and Scottish American trust, both of which were originally launched in 1873 to channel the savings of predominantly Scottish investors into the US railroad boom.

There is an enviable solidity about these vintage investment vehicles. Unlike many modern-day investors, who can barely remember the October market crash of 1987, the collective memory of the oldest investment trusts goes back to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and beyond that to the First World War. Today’s ivestors, who tremble every time Wall Street or London falls by a few per cent, might like to remember that the managers of the F&C, Dunedin and Scottish American trusts had to cope with Wall Street falling 12.8 per cent on a single day in October 1929, followed by an 11 per cent fall the following day. More recently, in the 1987 crash, they had to cope with the US stock market losing almost a quarter of its value in just a few hours.

So investors may conclude that if you want an investment team to manage your money in difficult times, you could do a lot worse than turn to the managers of old-established investment trusts who are the inheritors of generations of collective wisdom.

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