Nicholas Charles Purves
Co-Head of Equity Income & Value

Welcome to the Temple Bar 2026 AGM, a year in which the Temple Bar Investment Trust celebrates its centenary. The presentation today is going to split into two parts. We're going to talk a little bit about the trust itself, how it's structured today, how it's done in performance terms recently, and of course, how the trust performed in 2025.

And at the end, the second part, I'm going to go on and talk about a bit -- give a bit of stock market history, talk a bit about what investors should realistically expect over time through their equity investments and talk about why it is that we adopt within the Temple Bar Investment Trust, a value-driven investment strategy.

We start by looking backwards at the last few years. We've had the privilege of looking after the Temple Bar Investment Trust for 5.5 years now. We took on the trust in November 2020. And in the 5.5 years from November 2020 to the end of March of this year, the trust was able to deliver a return -- an NAV return of around 200%, which compares very favorably with the stock market return of around 100%. Now, clearly, that is a very satisfying result, and I'll talk a bit more about why the trust did particularly well in calendar 2025 later. But I probably want to start out by saying it's important to -- there is a little bit of good fortune involved in that. If you cast your minds back to November 2020 when we took on the trust, Obviously, we were still in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Sentiment in the stock market was extremely poor. Investors generally were very