Dividend yields of 5pc or more – if you can stomach capital risk

may be attractive for income seekers at a time of exceptionally low interest rates.”

Investment trusts can provide the chance to buy the assets they hold at a discount when the share price of the trust itself has fallen faster than the prices of the underlying holdings.

For some equity income investment trusts, this discount has widened in recent market weakness, creating an attractive time to buy and reducing the chance you will suffer heavy falls in the future. This is shown in the table on Page 1, where a negative figure denotes a discount.

Kieran Drake, a research analyst at the broker Winterflood, said: “Discounts have been widening in general this year on fears about the global economy. More recently in the UK, concerns about Brexit have led to some investors taking a wait-and-see approach and the lower demand has pushed discounts out even further.”

The investment trusts in our list have all, with the exception of City of London, moved to big discounts, in some a cases of more than 10pc.

Investors have a couple of clues to look for when establishing the resilience of an investment trust’s dividend. The dividend “cover” is the amount by which the dividend is exceeded by trust earnings. If earnings fall below the level of the dividend, the dividend is “uncovered” and hence unsustainable over the long term.

A trust with 100pc dividend cover has earnings that match its dividend exactly. A smaller percentage means the dividend is “uncovered”.

For a trust to go through periods in which its dividend is uncovered is not unusual. At these points it can draw on reserves held back from previous years.

Revenue reserves are often expressed in terms of the number of years for which they will sustain a dividend.

The investment trusts in our list were identified by Stifel as having the ability to maintain income to investors, even if the underlying picture for dividends deteriorated. All have dividend cover of at least 100pc.

Stifel said: “While dividend cuts cannot be ruled out, we do think that by using revenue reserves they should be able to deliver a more robust level of dividend than similar unit trusts, which do not maintain reserves.”