When he published Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872, Jules Verne can’t have expected it to serve, a century and a half later, as the template for a financial magazine’s long-running series on investment trusts.
Similarly, when we first thought to loosely trace the path of Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg in an exploration of listed funds in 2012, we didn’t anticipate the metaphor to drag out this long.
Still, the fact it has stuck feels oddly appropriate, considering the close parallels between the period in which the novel emerged, the history of pooled investment vehicles, and the professionalisation of global markets.