Would it be worth Trump buying Greenland?

London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad thing if they provoke sharper corporate performance. The assault by the New York hedge funder Boaz Weinstein on seven UK investment trusts – demanding shareholder votes to replace directors with his own people and take the management of the trusts into his own firm, Saba Capital – looks like the kind of intervention that might bring positive change to the UK’s historic investment trust sector, which accounts for a third of FTSE 250 companies but according to critics offers lacklustre returns, with share prices too often stuck at discounts to the underlying value of trusts’ asset portfolios (NAV).

By buying stakes of up to 29 per cent, Weinstein has already caused a narrowing of his targets’ discounts to NAV and claimed that proves he’s on the side of ‘mom and pop investors’. But the trusts – including Baillie Gifford US Growth, a long-term backer of Elon Musk’s ventures, and Herald, a respected investor in tech start-ups whose shareholder vote was due this week – have fought back, accusing Weinstein of lack of UK investment expertise and a poor track record (which he disputes) in his own fund.

They also say he’s picked on trusts with high numbers of retail investors trading through online platforms, who tend not to use their shareholder votes: so he may achieve the bare 50 per cent majorities he needs by default. My advice? Too late for Herald, but if you’re a holder of the other trusts he’s stalking, register your vote, listen to Weinstein on YouTube, and make up your own mind. I think you might conclude he’s more self-serving chancer than market hero.