The MoneyWeek fee based IFA list

No Monkey Business has featured in a list of fee based London IFA’s, prepared by MoneyWeek’s Merryn Somerset Webb.

Counting the cost

Should total expense ratios include trading costs?

Dipping into middle England’s pockets: the St James’s Place business model

Lots to read in St James’s Place 2008 Annual Statement of interest to No Monkey Business followers. Over 80,000 wealth management clients have voted for SJP with their cheque books, with an average portfolio value of £182,000. Only 14% have assets over £1m so this is not the high net worth marketplace. In middle-income middle England, costs really do count. As SJP themselves say, we are under-providing and over-reliant on property investments (instead of financial-asset holdings) for our retirement. But attaching high front-end and continuous charges to both the stock of financial assets and new assets (which the firm is still very efficient at acquiring) pushes clients away from their goal. SJP is a phenomenal success story but a bitter sweet one.

Believing alpha: how confident can we be of finding alpha in the UK funds industry?

European Forum for Fund Marketing and Distribution
24th September 2008
Chris Drew and Stuart Fowler (speakers)
For this industry event, Stuart Fowler and Chris Drew will draw on their findings from research within the UK fund market, asking how confident we can be of finding alpha in the UK funds industry and whether:

It is enough to justify the costs of [...]

Star fund managers in the doghouse – again

It’s time for the latest annual lambasting of dog funds by fund broker Bestinvest. Don’t you just love the irony of this? Or are you a gullible victim?