Bruce Stout

The £1.77 billion fund focuses on long term growth in dividends and capital ahead of inflation by investing principally in global equities.

Regarding the results, Bruce Stout, investment director of Murray International, said: “Seldom have economic and financial conditions deteriorated as rapidly as those that evolved over the first six months of 2022. The barbaric Russian invasion of Ukraine dominated the headlines, adding additional humanitarian, economic and political challenges to a world still plagued by problems from a global pandemic.

“Continuing lockdowns, supply chain disruptions and widespread shortages combined with upward pressure on wages created a seismic shift in global inflationary dynamics. Central Banks belatedly began to aggressively raise interest rates, their delusional expectations for just “temporary” then “transitory” inflation exposed as woefully inadequate for the negative emerging environment.

He continued: “As numerous global equity and bond markets succumbed to the general liquidity squeeze, identifying pressure points of distress proved painfully straightforward. Growth, inflation, interest rates, corporate profits, incomes and living standards all meaningfully deteriorated in terms of being supportive of prosperity. Yet perhaps most corrosive of all was the tangible change in sentiment.

“What became crystal clear throughout this turbulent period was an increasingly grudging realisation that there are no easy solutions to issues such as wage inflation, war in Ukraine, wanton interest rate policy, recession risks and the cost of living crisis.

“For the first time in well over a decade, certainly as regards financial markets, such prevailing pessimism manifested itself in selling into strength rather than buying into weakness. Against such a backdrop, capital destruction was likely to be ubiquitous, and so it proved.”