David Fuller's view One of the smaller positions in my personal long-term equity portfolio, in eleventh position recently, has been the iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 (FXC LN) (weekly & daily). As I recall, this is only the third tracker that I have ever held and it may be a long time before I invest in another one. Index trackers are mainly promoted on the basis of their low management fees, normally less than 1% per annum, and the fact that few investment managers actually outperform their benchmarks after fees are deducted. This is true but I have three reservations about trackers:

1) To maintain weightings they bid up the price of popular and ultimately overvalued shares in the index, at the expense of undervalued components; 2) This activity increases the tracker's share dealing costs, as do changes in the index; 3) The index in question may not provide the coverage that one might prefer.

This latter point is certainly true for the iShares FTSE Xinhua China 25 tracker (FXC LN) which tracks only 25 shares in the entire China region. I sold my positions in FXC yesterday at 8148.00p and 8139.00p. This money plus some accumulated dividends was reinvested in the JPMorgan Chinese Investment Trust (JMC LN) (weekly & daily) which I bought at 180.97p and 181.65p. JMC does not currently trade at a discount but the recent premium is only about 0.5%. The benchmark for this IT is the MSCI Golden Dragon A Index, providing broad access to China's various equity markets, plus Taiwan.