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How high costs are hidden by the fund management industry

The pension and fund management industry tries to get us to focus on performance – not costs – when it comes to investing.

This is pretty ironic, given that most fund managers actually under-perform a simple tracker fund.

Indeed, in its first video on the case for passive investing in index funds, Sensible Investing quoted research that found that merely 1% of fund managers showed any evidence of skill that might be worth charging for.

In 99% of cases, there was no skill on show at all. Given this, performance is clearly a distracting sideshow.

High costs pull down the returns you see from active funds. They simply enrich the industry at the expense of your pension.

Worse, most investors have no idea what they’re actually paying for, as outlined in this second video:

Gina Miller of The True and Fair Campaign – which pushes for fairer, more transparent investing – estimates that there can be 11-13 layers of charges applied to your pension.

And as Nobel Prize-winning economist Eugene Fama says:

“If you’re paying management fees, the cumulative effect of that, given the way compounding works, is enormous. So active managers basically charge on average 1% in the US on management fees and you never know what their transactions costs are because that’s not a reported number but they’ve gotta be way higher than for passive managers because they’re going in and out of securities all the time.”

Instead of the red herring of chasing performance, you’re much better off drilling down the costs you pay to make your investments – including the charges levied by your broker or fund platform.

Check out the rest of the videos in this series so far.

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You may have already seen the first part of the upcoming 10-part documentary on passive investing by Sensible Investing, as I featured it in Saturday’s Weekend Reading.

I think the rest of this series looks very promising. There’s a roster of high quality interviewees to come and the videos make the case for index funds versus active fund management in a down-to-earth fashion.

So I’ve decided to run all the videos as they appear here on Monevator.

You’ll find part one in the video series – entitled How to Win the Loser’s Game – below. Please note that if you’re reading via email you may need to visit Monevator to see the video.

Perhaps the killer line in this video is the revelation that one single fund manager was paid £17.5 million in 2013.

That’s 600 times the average UK salary!

Of course the high costs spread far wider than just one person. Indeed, at one fund management company surveyed, the average salary was a cool £436,000.

As Lars Kroijer – himself a former hedge fund manager – has previously revealed on Monevator, paying for the high costs of active management hugely reduces just how much the typical investor in active funds will earn over their investing lifetime.

Given the evidence that the average active fund fails to beat the UK market, you must really like fund managers if you want to keep them in sports cars and Mock Tudor mansions at the expense of your own retirement!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the title of the video refers to a famous article on the poor odds of active fund management written by Charles D. Ellis in 1975, which he’s updated in his recent book, Winning the Loser’s Game.

Check out the rest of the videos in this series so far.

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Weekend reading

Good reads from around the Web.

The US blogger Mr Money Mustache has been making spendthrifts and complainers feel like they must try harder for years, to widespread acclaim and the occasional brickbat.

For my part I’ve always felt smugly on-side with Team Mustache, given that I’ve saved a big slug of my earnings for years and I’m well aware of how I (occasionally) spend my money.

However this week Monsieur Mustache opened up a new front in the doing-things-better-than battle, making me feel inadequate as a blogger as a result.

He’s only gone and create his own investing tool!

It’s called IndexView and it looks like this:

Note to the easily befuddled: This is just a non-interactive screenshot of the tool.

Note to the easily befuddled: This is just a non-interactive screenshot of the tool.

The idea of IndexView is that you can change the dates and see how time would have smoothed out your returns and spared your worry wrinkles, despite some crazy crashes along the way.

There are also various overlays you can add to the graph, such as the much touted cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio.

The tool only offers US data, but Tristan Hume – who everyone’s favourite mustachioed mister hired to do the coding – says he’d be happy to add another country’s data. However he hasn’t found any UK source that’s as easy to work with as Professor Shiller’s data is for the US.

I had fun playing around with it – give it a try.

[continue reading…]

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Vanguard is shaving a few more basis points off the cost of passive investing

Everyone likes a sale. So what’s better than news from Vanguard that some of our favourite cheap tracker funds and ETFs will now cost us even fewer pennies?

As detailed below, the passive investing behemoth has shaved a few more basis points off a range of its funds and ETFs, including the ultra-convenient LifeStrategy funds.

These lower ongoing charges are effective from 1 September, and apply whether you’re a new customer or an existing investor in one of these Vanguard products.

And that’s always great news. Fewer pennies to Vanguard means more money for you in retirement!

In the Vanguard

Now we’re not normally ones for reporting on the tawdry matters of day-to-day mercantile machinations here on Monevator.

Frankly, we haven’t got the resources to send The Accumulator scuttling about the eateries and watering holes of The City to fish for topical tidbits – and The Accumulator explicitly stated that he was only interested in scuttling about The City’s streets if it definitely did involve stopping by its eateries and watering holes. Frequently.

But hey, this is Vanguard, a company we salute so often we’ve been accused of being a front for its nefarious plans to make investing cheaper. (We’re not – but we’re very open to the odd non-editorially compromising advertising campaign, if any Vanguard marketing managers happen to be reading…)

When Vanguard – the trendsetter in cheapness – cuts prices, it matters.

The cost of passive investing in the UK is already low, but the ongoing price cuts prove that – just like in the US before us – the price war is not yet over.

What’s more, The Accumulator is still on his holidays and I’m struggling to finish a giant post about bookkeeping. And it’s summer. And Lower Charges From Vanguard is better than a dead donkey, right?

Now let’s just hope some of those pesky platform fees start to fall, too.

The following tables detail Vanguard’s new lower ongoing charges in full.

UK and Irish Domiciled Index Mutual Fund Range

Fund Name Former Ongoing Charge New Ongoing Charge
Vanguard FTSE U.K. Equity Index Fund 0.15% 0.08%
Vanguard FTSE U.K. Equity Income Index Fund 0.25% 0.22%
Vanguard FTSE U.K. All Share Index Unit Trust 0.15% 0.08%
Vanguard FTSE Developed World ex-U.K. Equity Index Fund 0.30% 0.15%
Vanguard FTSE Developed Europe ex-U.K. Equity Index Fund 0.25% 0.12%
Vanguard U.S. Equity Fund 0.20% 0.10%
Vanguard SRI Global Stock Fund 0.40% 0.35%
Vanguard Global Small-Cap Index Fund 0.40% 0.38%
Vanguard SRI European Stock Fund 0.35% 0.30%
Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund 0.40% 0.27%
Vanguard Japan Stock Index Fund 0.30% 0.23%
Vanguard Pacific Ex-Japan Stock Index Fund 0.30% 0.23%
Vanguard U.K. Investment Grade Bond Index Fund 0.20% 0.15%
Vanguard U.K. Short Term  Inv. Grade Bond Index Fund 0.20% 0.15%
Vanguard Global Bond Index Fund 0.20% 0.15%
Vanguard Global Short-Term Bond Index Fund 0.20% 0.15%

 

Exchange Traded Fund Range

Fund Name Existing Ongoing Charge New Ongoing Charge
Vanguard S&P 500 UCITS ETF 0.09% 0.07%
Vanguard FTSE 100 UCITS ETF 0.10% 0.09%
Vanguard FTSE Developed Europe UCITS ETF 0.15% 0.12%
Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets UCITS ETF 0.29% 0.25%

 

LifeStrategy Fund Range

Fund Name Existing Ongoing Charge New Ongoing Charge
Vanguard LifeStrategy 20 % Equity Fund 0.29% 0.24%
Vanguard LifeStrategy 40 % Equity Fund 0.29% 0.24%
Vanguard LifeStrategy 60 % Equity Fund 0.29% 0.24%
Vanguard LifeStrategy 80 % Equity Fund 0.29% 0.24%
Vanguard LifeStrategy 100 % Equity Fund 0.29% 0.24%

 

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