Neptune UK mid cap should also be mentioned. It's a tiny fund (under 10 million), but check out its performance...

http://www.trustnet.com/Factsheets/Factsheet.aspx?fundCode=DXFC8&univ=O

Re Slater Growth, look at the chart - can someone tell me why there was an jump of about 50% in one day?

Do you mean at the end of 2009 and into 2010? If so, the investment mandate of the fund was changed and there were large changes made to the portfolio. (Taken from the 2010 annual report that is still available as a download from Trustnet - Downloads section on the RH-side of the Trustnet factsheet page)

I would love to invest in McInroy & Wood Smaller Companies but it's not available to the retail investor on either Hargreaves Landsdown or Fidelity, the two platforms my wife and I use for our ISAs and SIPPs. More inflows would happen if the fund manager and the platforms made the fund accessible. All the other funds in the article are acessible on the platforms I mention and I invest in all of them. So McInroy & Wood, HL & Fidelity it's up to you.

Given the statements made on McInroy & Wood's web-site it would appear to be unlikely that their funds would be made avaialble via a third-party platform. Looks as if the only choice is to stump up the £10k minimum and invest directly with them.

Yes, it is odd that a fund with the performance of Close Special Situations has FUM £14mln, when Manek Growth has £22 mln and a far higher TER. But this is the charm of this industry.

This could have something to do with the following.
1. MFM Slater Growth does not appear on some fund platforms, Skandia being one of them.
2. McIlroy and Wood does not subscribe to Trustnet, does not appear on Skandia and costs £25.51p per unit. £1000 only buys 40 units so a penny rise in the price only earns 40 pence. Why would you buy it when you can have 653 shares in M+G Global Dividend at £1.5294 returning £6.53 per penny rise?
3. Close Special Situations has not updated it's Trustnet fact sheet since December 2011. The fact that it has lost 19.5% over the last year when it's benchmark has risen 0.1% is probably not helping either.

Tiny Clanger.....forget pennies, it's percentages you should think about.....

Sorry "Harmonius" but at the risk of being shot down in flames again I have to disagree. I would be quite happy getting a 5% payrise if I was earning £100,000 per year; I wouldn't be at all happy getting a 5% rise if I was only on £10,000 per year. Percentages just cover up a multitude of sins. My personal view is that a fund trading currently at say £2 has more chance of rising 10% than a fund trading at £20. As an example, I bought Investec Global Gold at £1.68 in July 2010. Since then I have sold some at over £2.20, waited, then bought back at £1.75 and price is currently £1.70---a rise of just over 1% on July 2010. I sold Blackrock Gold and General in April 2010 at £13. The current bid price is £13.15, again a rise of just over 1%. Although £100 invested in each fund on the above dates is only showing a 4p difference, the TER of Blackrock is 1.94% but Investec is only 1.61%. Given that I wouldn't have had enough units in Blackrock to trade with, I would have lost money on Blackrock even if I'd not traded Investec either due to the higher charges. I think I'll carry on with the cheap and cheerful funds.

Tiny Clanger - I'll shoot you down if that's ok ;) The price per unit has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with how much it will rise or fall. You make a very valid point regarding TER, but that has nothing to do with unit prices. Generally, the unit price of a mutual fund is based on an arbitrary starting value. Most mutual funds launch with a price of 50-100p per share. If they do extremely well, then the unit price will be significantly higher. For example BlackRock Gold and General launched in 1988 with a price of 100p per unit, while Investec Global Gold only launched in 2006 at a price of 100p per unit (source HL). The reason the BlackRock fund price is higher is because it's had an extra 16 years to grow. Whether a funds price goes up or down and by how much depends on the assets the funds holds. The higher TER makes the BlackRock fund more expensive, not the unit price.

Just to provoke further debate, consider the Vanguard US Equity Index fund. Launched in the UK in June 2009 at a cost of £100 (yes 100 POUNDS) per unit. Current price per unit is £169.61, but the TER is 0.2%. Would you say that was an "expensive" or "cheap" fund? My first investment in this fund of £1000 via Hargreaves Lansdown a couple of weeks ago bought me about 5.9859 units.

P.S.
I didn't really understand your comment about "not having enough units to trade in".

Hi Adam,
Good point, well made. I would say that the Vanguard fund is a good buy but,at that price, I wouldn't be buying it. In my example, £100 would have bought me 7.7 units of Blackrock and 59.5 units of Investec. As long as both go up at the same rate it makes no difference which one I invest in. However, both have different AUMs and different percentages invested in their holdings. Blackrock (£2932.3 million AUM) means that a 10% holding in say, Newcrest Mining is worth £293 million whereas a 10% holding in Investec (£179.9 million AUM)in the same fund is less than £18 million. In the event of Newcrest's share price falling Blackrock loses the same percentage as Investec but an awful lot more money. This must reflect in the unit price unless something else goes up to compensate. With Investec I can sell half of my holding and still have a fair amount left to take advantage of any rise in the price. With Blackrock I would only be left with a small amount of units so would have to hope for a bigger rise to compensate.

Tiny Clanger - these (OEICs/Unit Trusts) aren't exchange traded investments like company shares. They're bought and sold through the fund company - so you don't have to deal in whole shares. If you had a single £100 unit and wanted to sell half of your holding you could conceivably do that, and be left with 0.5 of a unit worth £50. Just to back up what others have said it makes not one iota of difference to the funds performance or anything else whether the units are priced at £1, £100 or whatever. It's the performance of the underlying investments that is most important..

Sorry Tiny Clanger, but the cost of units is a totally irrelevant fact. If the M&G Global Dividend that you use as an example goes up 1p, that equates to a 0.65% rise, while a 1p rise in the M&W fund would only equate to a 0.04% rise. This is a totally meaningless comparison, but one that lots of people seem to insist on making. The cost per unit has no bearing on how the price will change. It's purely a psychological thing.