// Author: Bella Caridade-Ferreira
27 Jan 2020 Chinese New Year
The first day of the Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival or the Lunar Near Year, fell at the weekend on Saturday 25 January. It also heralded the start of the year of the Rat, the first in the 12-strong Chinese zodiac.
04 Nov 2019 Embark embarks on platform domination…
Alliance Trust was saved from a fate worse than death when it was sold to Interactive Investor, a D2C platform, last year. Ever since, the industry has been wondering whether Interactive Investor would move into the advised platform arena or stick to its knitting. The wondering is finally over as it was announced that Embark is buying the adviser platform.
01 Aug 2019 The lion, the sale and the god of the sea
Thank goodness someone has come along to save Neptune. It's been an unhappy ship for a long time and was crying out for a solid and reputable captain like Liontrust to set it back on the right course (warning: this is full of maritime metaphors).
30 Jul 2019 Zip a dee do don’t?
Rumours abound that the Zurich Intermediary Platform (ZIP) is up for sale and Aegon is said to be first in line to snap up the platform.
30 Jul 2019 Fundscape fantasy fund league – half time
We’re midway through the Fundscape Fantasy Fund League so here's a quick update on our teams are doing as at June 2019. To remind you, this experiment is about the Fundscape team gaining insight into fund selection, and learning about investments and the impact of market conditions in real time.
27 May 2019 Volatility, value for money and gatekeepers
Over the last decade, a key feature of the retail investment landscape has been the industry’s development of risk-grading as a response to the suitability issue. How do advisers and their clients best ensure that the portfolio selected for them is most likely to produce the capital appreciation and income provision they expect, with the fewest surprises? In other words, what is the risk that they don’t achieve their goals? That risk has been distilled down to a single figure on a risk-scale derived from a portfolio’s expected standard deviation of returns, also known as volatility.
01 May 2019 Learning to ski – lifetime mortgages
Fundscape CEO, Bella Caridade-Ferreira, will be chairing an Altus event — Learning to Ski - Lifetime mortgages — on 15th May.
01 May 2019 Building blocks for gatekeepers
After a year like 2018, it's no surprise if some advisers’ minds turned to so-called safe havens. One asset class that used to fall into that classification was Property.
30 Apr 2019 Fantasy Fund League – Carrie’s Diamonds
This week we meet Carrie de Carteret who has worked in the financial services industry for many years as a data architect and data modelling expert (in today's big data world she's in huge demand). Carrie has taken a logical and methodical approach to her fund selection, but will it pay off?
15 Apr 2019 Gatekeepers in the mix (40-85%)
Gatekeepers tend to select single-strategy funds as building blocks in broader portfolios, so the presence of multi-asset funds on gatekeeper lists is usually to cater for one-stop shoppers on D2C platforms, for ISAs for example, or to satisfy the needs of smaller investments through advisers where they may be aimed (unfairly) at so-called less-sophisticated investors.
11 Apr 2019 Fantasy Fund League – Ocean’s 5
We continue our meet-the-manager series in our Fundscape Fantasy Fund League. This week it's Dr Tim Burrows, manager of Ocean’s 5 team and Fundscape’s resident fund performance and maths guru.
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