42 FTSE 250 constituents have no digital infrastructure at all

When a collector returns nothing, the first assumption is that the collector is broken. We started building a list of FTSE 250 companies with no domain attached to them, expecting to find a seeding bug. There was no bug. The list turned out to be a category.

Not mostly. All of them. Baillie Gifford Japan Trust, Monks Investment Trust, Mercantile Investment Trust, City of London Investment Trust, Bankers Investment Trust, Herald Investment Trust, Murray International, Fidelity Special Values, the JPMorgan trusts, the BlackRock trusts, the Schroder funds. There is no residual group of ordinary trading companies that we simply failed to seed.

Why a FTSE 250 company can have no website

A listed investment trust is a company in the legal sense and almost nothing like one in the operational sense. It has a board, a share price, a market capitalisation large enough to put it in the FTSE 250, and shareholders with real voting rights. What it does not have is employees, offices, products, or an IT department. The actual work — deciding what to buy, executing trades, producing the factsheets, running the website — is done by a management company under contract.

So the trust’s web presence belongs to its manager. Monks Investment Trust lives at bailliegifford.com, on the same infrastructure as every other Baillie Gifford product. Mercantile lives inside am.jpmorgan.com. We checked whether the obvious standalone domains existed for a sample of them — the kind of name a company would register if it wanted its own site — and they resolve to nothing at all:

This is not an oversight on their part. There is nothing for a separate domain to serve. A trust with no staff has no email to route, no VPN to terminate, no staging environment, no careers site. Registering one would create an asset somebody would then have to secure and renew, in exchange for nothing.

The distinction that makes it interesting

The obvious conclusion would be “investment trusts do not have websites”, and it is wrong. The FTSE 250 contains roughly 67 investment vehicles. Only 42 of them have no domain:

So it is a live choice rather than a structural inevitability, and the split lines up with who runs the trust. The vehicles operated by the largest managers — Baillie Gifford, JPMorgan, BlackRock, Fidelity, Schroders — are overwhelmingly the ones with no domain: a house with dozens of products puts them all on one platform, because that is cheaper and more consistent than forty separate websites. The trusts with their own domains tend to be run by smaller or single-product managers, where the trust is the brand rather than one line on a product list.

The same pattern does not appear higher up the index. Every FTSE 100 investment vehicle we hold — Scottish Mortgage, Alliance Witan, F&C Investment Trust, Polar Capital Technology Trust — runs its own domain. At that size the trust is a destination in its own right.

What this does to the numbers

Index membership is a statement about market capitalisation, and nothing else. It is tempting to read a list of large listed companies as a list of large organisations, and for roughly a sixth of the FTSE 250 that reading is simply false: the entity in the index has a market value in the hundreds of millions and an operational footprint of zero.

For anyone measuring corporate infrastructure this matters more than it sounds. Any per-company average across the FTSE 250 — subdomains, mail providers, security headers, hosting concentration — is computed over a population where 17% of the members cannot contribute a data point, not because collection failed but because there is nothing there to collect. Averaging them in as zeros understates the index; dropping them silently overstates it. We report them as what they are, which is why the coverage page shows domain counts alongside company counts rather than folding them together.

It also means the interesting question about a trust is not “what infrastructure does it run?” but “whose infrastructure is it sitting on?” — and that is a question about concentration risk among a handful of fund managers, not about the trust at all.

Method: domain counts are from OSIC’s own catalogue for the FTSE 250 as currently seeded. Candidate domains in the table above were resolved live immediately before publication; “does not resolve” means no A, AAAA or CNAME record was returned. The classification of a constituent as an investment vehicle was made by inspecting the full list of domainless constituents by hand rather than by name-matching alone, because a pattern match on words like “trust” or “fund” misses names such as Aberdeen Asia Focus and Fidelity China Special Situations.