Veteran investor Nick Train has ploughed around £225,000 into his Finsbury Growth & Income (FGT ) trust, reiterating his confidence in the faltering portfolio which faces its first ever continuation vote next year.

The Lindsell Train co-founder, who has run the near 100-year-old portfolio since 2000, snapped up 25,000 ordinary shares at an average price of 898.90p per share at a total estimated cost of £224,725.

The latest purchase means Train is the sixth largest shareholder with a stake of 3.6%, or 5,510,043 shares, worth close to £50m in the £1.37bn market-cap fund.

Extending his ‘skin in the game’ comes at a crucial for Finsbury Growth as Train is being given a year to get investors back on side ahead of a continuation vote in January 2026.

As at the end of November, the trust’s net asset value (NAV) and share price had both underperformed the FTSE All Share benchmark over one, three and five years. Over the past year, the portfolio’s NAV has grown 12.5% while the shares are up 10.7%, lagging the 15.7% gain in the index.

Over three years, the performance is worse, with the NAV increasing just 12.2% and the shares rising a measly 7% against a 25.5% gain in the benchmark.

The issues with performance pre-date the sell-off in growth stocks that started in late 2021 as inflation and interest rates surged. The shares peaked in September 2019 at 958p and have broadly traded sideways since then, excepting a short-lived plunge in the 2020 pandemic.

However, Train has always maintained he is a buy and hold investor, picking up long-term stakes in a concentrated pool of big names, and over the longer-term his strategy continues to pay out. Train he grown the NAV 118.4% in the past 10 years, and a staggering 693.6% since he started managing the fund, while the shares are up 99.6% and 746.3%, respectively.

This is in stark contrast to an 81.1% rise in the FTSE All Share over 10 years and 249.4% since 2000.

In the full-year results for the fund published at the beginning of December, Train said he shared in investors’ ‘disappointment’ and ‘frustration’ with the performance, but concluded that the best way for the performance to recover is to ‘run a concentrated portfolio, built around the shares of exceptional UK companies’.

He confirmed he continues ‘to increase my personal holding’ as ‘I believe an alignment of interest between investment manager and investor is important’. However, this was not his main motivation for upping his investment in the trust.

‘When I look at the portfolio today, I am more enthused about its prospects – and by association the UK stock market – than at any time this century. I have increased my holding because London Stock Exchange (LSEG), Experian (EXPN), Diageo (DGE), Sage (SGE), and Relx (REL)…not only happen to be listed on the London market, but are genuine world class companies with substantive growth opportunities in front of them,’ he said.

‘[The trust] holds those businesses in big quantities, and if our analysis of them is right, the impact on returns in the coming years will be very significant indeed.’