Welcome our blog. This is where we share thought-provoking, no-holds-barred opinions and commentaries on all things retirement income, financial planning and investing!
Will the FCA’s inducement rules kill off on-platform tools?
Should advisers use free – but often inferior – tools offered by platforms and product providers, or should they pay for best-of-breed, independent tools available in the marketplace? This debate has raged among advisers for a long time. The FCA might have...
Cobras, Unintended Consequences & Multi-Asset Funds
Today, we publish our Multi-Asset Fund Guide 2018 titled Dysfunctional Families. This guide is an in-depth analysis of 91 fund families consisting of 402 individual funds in which a £148bn of client’s money is invested. The story of the cobra in India during British...
Living on planet GARS: Lessons in how (NOT) to invest
A recent article in the Guardian is the latest indictment of the Standard Life GARS fund. The fund has underperformed virtually all imaginable benchmarks over the last three and five years. 3-Year Cumulative Return 5-Year Cumulative Return Is it just me or does anyone...
Lessons from 118 years of asset class returns data
The annual Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook (2018) should be on your reading list. Compiled by Professors Elroy Dimson (Cambridge), Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton (London Business School), this epic publication provides incredible insight into asset...
Phoenixed! The end of Standard Life as we know it and implication for platform users
The big news on Friday is that Standard Life Aberdeen (SLA) has agreed to flog its life and pension business to the grandmaster of dead closed book consolidation, aka Phoenix Group. Phoenix is where customer service goes to die. It's where life policies become...
Cash reserve buffers, withdrawal rates and old wives’ fables for retirement portfolios
Managing retirement income portfolios is riddled with old wives’ fables; practices handed down from adviser to adviser but with very little empirical basis. (Really, these practices are often promulgated by men, so the term ‘old men’s fables’ is probably more...
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