or many years smaller company stocks have been thought one of the best ways to reap investment returns for the long run. The logic is that the smaller a company, the greater its scope for growth. Yet since the pandemic, with interest rates high across much of the world, that simply hasn’t held true—instead the biggest companies have outperformed.

When stocks fall out of favour like smaller companies have been for the past few years, they need a catalyst to revive their fortunes.

The past 50 years have seen one crisis after another —the high inflation of the 1970s, the recession of the 1990s, the global financial crisis of 2008 and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet through all this time The Global Smaller Companies Trust has delivered consecutive annual dividend increases.