George Booth and Ian Fairbairn: The First Unit Trusts, 1931–1960

Nigel Edward Morecroft

Chapter 7 in The Origins of Asset Management from 1700 to 1960, 2017, pp 221-268 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Unit trusts encouraged smaller savers and women to invest, despite the 1929 Crash, mainly into ordinary shares. Easy to understand, they contributed to a growing interest in equity investing, as indicated by the creation of the FT30 Index in 1935. The first unit trusts offered transparency in pricing, trusteeship and complete redeemability and were an antidote to the excesses of the 1929 Crash embodied by the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation and other investment companies in the USA. Booth and Fairbairn of Municipal and General, a forerunner of the M&G Group, created and nurtured unit trusts through their extended 30-year, formative period in the UK and developed early ideas about ‘value’ investing. By contrast, mutual funds in the USA had a completely different, and much more rapid, pattern of development.

Keywords: Mutual Fund; Asset Management; Equity Investing; Investment Company; Investment Performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-3-319-51850-3_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783319518503

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-51850-3_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().