by The Investor
on December 9, 2009
Readers may recall I’m a bit of an investment trust fan.
Besides that introductory article, I’ve written in-depth articles on three trusts – RIT Capital Partners, The Rights and Issues Trust, and Prodesse – and I included a few trusts in my nine lazy ETF portfolios.
Reminder: Investment trusts are companies that manage pooled investment vehicles and trade on the stock market. They have particular strengths and weaknesses over unit trusts and the passive alternative, ETFs.
While investment trusts aren’t for everyone, they do give us options, and the oldest in the UK have been around longer than air travel or the motorcar.
One such veteran is Alliance Trust, a Dundee-based FTSE 100 company that has been investing since 1888 and that currently manages over £2 billion of assets.
Alliance has seen a lot over the years, from multiple wars to abdications to fervent socialist Governments, so when it’s worried by the AIFM directive coming out of Europe, I think we should take some notice.
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by The Investor
on December 7, 2009
Responding to my recent post about buying government bonds for diversification, a reader asked if I’d considered using absolute return funds or hedge funds instead.
I have, but only superficially; I’m far from an expert in either kind of fund, but I don’t particularly like what’s on offer, especially as a replacement for bonds.
In this post I’ll consider absolute return funds. Hedge funds we’ll look at some other day, perhaps when I’ve grown less jealous of the anti-hero hedge fund manager John Veals in Sebastian Faulks’ new novel A Week In December, who seems to have a whale of a time throughout the book.
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by The Investor
on December 5, 2009
My regular Saturday comment followed by this week’s blog and financial site links.
Ever wondered why people are bad with money? Turn to today’s Financial Times, which reports that most financial advisers have never recommended a low-cost ETF:
Just under two-thirds of independent financial advisers (IFAs) have never advised on ETFs, while 23 per cent have recommended the products to less than 10 per cent of their clients, according to research carried out by the Financial Times and Skandia, the investment group.
What a disgrace. These people are supposedly professionals, paid by their clients for advice on the best investing products, and almost two-thirds of them have shunned one that delivers cheaply and efficiently.
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by The Investor
on December 4, 2009
Reader Len Penzo raised a very good point in response to my post about how your investing might change if you knew when you’d die:
I notice you have taken the perspective of a single man with no kids. But what if you have a family, Investor? That changes the calculus yet again!
For example, if I was single with no kids and knew I had two months to live – or five years, for that matter – then I would make sure the last penny of my savings would be used to pay the mortician who cremates me.
Ah, but with a wife and kids, those thought equations are turned upside down.
I wrote the original post to provoke thought, rather than to cover all the eventualities, but I decided Len’s point was such a good one that it deserved a specific follow-up.
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