Discounts to the value of assets held, and more rarely premiums, are par for the course when it comes to investment trusts. These are best understood as the gap between the share price and the net asset value (NAV). For example, a trust with 100p of assets per share and a 95p share price trades at a 5% discount to NAV. Discounts can give savvy investors the chance to buy assets for less than...

According to the latest Dividend Monitor report from Computershare, which looks after the share registers of 900 companies, total UK corporate dividend payments fell 4.6% or £700 million in the first quarter of this year to £14 billion. The decline was mainly due to lower one-off special dividends and a handful of large cuts from firms such as Burberry (BRBY) and Vodafone (VOD), which halved...