Jittery investors are rushing to buy gold and government bonds as the threat of a global recession sparked by Trump and his trade wars intensifies. Such is the fear that according to Deutsche Bank, investors have apparently invested US$15trn (25% of the total bond market) in negative-yielding government bonds — a number that has tripled since October 2018.
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).
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.
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.
Now that Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister, the possibility of crashing out of the EU on 31st October looms large on the horizon. It would be no surprise, therefore, if advisers and investors turned to so-called safe havens like property.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry has had a pop at Neil (yes, the villain has a first name) Woodford over the last few days. Countless rent-a-mouths have queued up to drizzle us with their schadenfreude (most know nothing about funds). But while they like to claim they saw it coming, they conveniently forgot to warn the rest of us.
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.
Last week Investec announced it was closing its Click & Invest Robo-advice service. And it didn’t hang around either — the site was taken down as soon as the announcement was made. It’s a shame because Click & Invest had the potential to be different.
Fundscape CEO, Bella Caridade-Ferreira, will be chairing an Altus event — Learning to Ski - Lifetime mortgages — on 15th May.
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.
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?
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.
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