The growth illusion

Is it not obvious that investing in higher growth countries will yield higher returns? Not at all. This is one of the traps investors regularly fall into. Saturday’s FT has a timely reminder.

How did we do in 2008?

Whose performance is it anyway? When clients’ portfolios are genuinely customised to personal goals whose terms of reference they have jointly planned and taken responsibility for, it is reasonable to answer questions about performance with a question of our own. Yet the question posed is also a matter of fact we ought to be able to answer. In this article we provide the answer together with some guidance as to what, if anything, it means.

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 [...]

Calling the bear market: how did we do?

We are not economists but we need to rely to some extent on economic insights in order to advise families on finance or manage their portfolios. Sometimes, economics are not necessary and all the information is in asset valuations. Not this time: seeing this bear market coming was all about economics. So how did we do? Pretty well, actually. Because we share our views with blog readers, our record can be scrutinised. In this post, I have linked some of Stuart’s past blog items to examine our record, starting with our investment strategy as we spelled it out in October 2006.

Absolute-return investing: time for clarity

Fans of absolute-return investing claim it represents ‘the future of asset management’, its attackers that it is just a fad. Most investment fads are intellectually lazy: they describe concepts but appeal to emotions. The most appealing of investment concepts are versions of the free lunch: the ‘something for nothing’ culture. For absolute-return products, the claimed USP is that you can generate much more upside return than you risk in absolute loss and that this is more efficient and rational than harvesting long-term risk premiums from volatile assets by accepting large interim losses.