What caught my eye this week.
Here’s a reminder as to why I tag Moguls – our premium membership content for select Monevator readers – as ‘not for everyone’.
Our last two Moguls articles showcased a model portfolio of mostly actively managed investment trusts that aims to deliver a natural yield for long-term income.
In contrast, the latest SIPP report just dropped from Interactive Investor. And it reveals that for the first time, passive funds have overtaken active funds as the most popular choices for SIPP investors on the II platform – for both accumulating and deaccumulating investors.
According to the accompanying bumph:
Appetite for investment trusts has waned in recent years, and our data illustrates this is the case for investors across the board.
By contrast, allocations to ETFs have surged with SIPP investors wooed by their simplicity and low costs.
Play a sad bagpipe lament from Spotify as you peruse the waning of the investment trust era:
Source: Interactive Investor
Six out of the top ten funds for accumulators are now passive funds. Three of them are Vanguard LifeStrategy offerings. Global trackers make up the rest of II’s popular passives list.
This is all to be celebrated.
My pitch for Moguls is not a cunning bluff. I believe most people should be passive investors. That this message has got through – and that more investors are widely-diversifying using the funds highlighted – is cheering, and a far cry from when this blog began life back in 2007.
Some of us are investing nutters though. Or we just have a competitive urge to try to do better.
I hope investment trusts survive to help us scratch our itch. And if they don’t, there’s always stockpicking.
Passive investors can be passionate investors too, of course. Please sign-up to our Mavens premium content if that’s you. The Accumulator has been knocking it out of the park with his monthly deep dives.
A quick note on RSS feeds
I was surprised to learn this week that a few Monevator readers still follow our site via RSS. (If you’re under 30 and have no idea what I’m talking about, ask the nearest Gen X-er).
Sadly I found out this because our age-old RSS feed seems to have broken.
We’re not yet sure exactly what’s gone wrong. It looks like some kind of redirection issue. But as best I can tell this source feed should be good for now. You might have to resubscribe to follow it.
I’m aware some icons around the site still point to the old and possibly terminally knackered RSS feed. But I’m not changing the links until I’m sure what’s up.
Personally I’d subscribe via email. The writing has been on the wall for RSS for years. But we’ll try to keep supporting it for as long as we can.
Have a great weekend!
From Monevator
Money market vs bonds: which is best? – Monevator
Monzo, EIS, crowdfunding and capital gains tax – Monevator
From the archive-ator: Swap rates and mortgage rates – Monevator
News
New warning over ‘stealth’ £9bn income tax raid – City AM
Bond managers fear Rachel Reeves will break her fiscal rules – Morningstar
Property sales in May reached a four-year high, says Zoopla – Mortgage Strategy
Starling’s profits drop 25% as bank takes the blame for Covid loan losses – Guardian
Billionaire tech entrepreneur joins non-dom exodus – City AM
The ultra-rich are moving their money to Singapore as global risks mount – CNBC
Coin collection hidden from the Nazis sells for £5.7m at auction – This Is Money
UK car making plunges to lowest in 70 years [I wonder what happened in 2016?] – BBC
Products and services
Get £180 plus another £20 with Santander’s switch offer – Be Clever With Your Cash
Safe and easy ways to recycle and get money for your old gadgets – Guardian
Six questions to ask yourself before buying travel insurance – Which
Get up to £1,500 cashback when you transfer your cash and/or investments to Charles Stanley Direct through this link. Terms apply – Charles Stanley
Fears 300,000 electricity meters won’t work after tech switch off – Guardian
Vet complaint process often ‘stacked against pet owners’ – Guardian
Nine myths about income protection busted – Which
End-of-terrace homes for sale, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
If anything, bond markets are returning to normal – Bloomberg via AP
Can you still make money from UK property? [Paywall] – FT
The rise of middle-class multi-millionaires – Financial Samurai
Morgan Housel on spending money [Podcast] – At The Money
Anything above zero compounds – A Teachable Moment
You don’t lose money in bonds if you wait long enough – Of Dollars and Data
How rich is rich, anyway? [Paywall] – FT
Why value investing has worked better outside the US – Morningstar
“I left London for a cheaper life, but I’m still paying £150 for a haircut” – i Paper
Should you decant a pension into an ISA to get ahead of IHT? – This Is Money
Generational wealth vs ‘enough’ – White Coat Investor
Can you avoid inheritance tax by owning a historic listed building? – This Is Money
People earn more when their mortgage rates rise [Research] – Alpha Architect
Government’s UK pension fund makeover mini-special
Pension plans to double £25bn-plus megafunds and boost investment… – Gov.uk
…handily summarised by the BBC – BBC
Reeves confirms plans can set ‘binding’ asset allocations – City AM via Yahoo
Will megafunds really put an extra £6,000 in the average pension? – Guardian
Naughty corner: Active antics
Improve returns by facing your fears, says Billions inspiration – Morningstar
How to ‘cheat’ – Behavioural Investment
Tariff impacts are starting to show up in the US economy… – Bond Dad
…but at least data centre buildouts are adding 1% to US GDP – Axios
Stock drawdowns and recoveries [Research, PDF] – Morgan Stanley
Kindle book bargains
Hype Machine: Inside the Cult of Crypto by Joshua Oliver – £0.99 on Kindle
The Price of Money by Rob Dix – £0.99 on Kindle
The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns by Linda Yueh – £0.99 on Kindle
Failed State: Why Britain Doesn’t Work by Sam Freedman – £0.99 on Kindle
Or pick up one of the all-time great investing classics – Monevator shop
Environmental factors
Celebrating 25 years of London’s extra lungs – BBC
How penguin poop helps Antarctica keep its cool – Biographic
Earth is heading for 2.7 degrees of warming this century. That’s dire – The Conversation
Robot overlord roundup
The people who think AI might become conscious – BBC
A 1000x increase in AI demand – Tom Tunguz
Amazon workers say they have to work harder, faster, with AI – NYP via Yahoo
Using facial recognition to assess loan delinquency risks [Research, for now…] – Alpha Architect
Not at the dinner table
Seven truths about trade – Tim Harford
The four phases of institutional collapse in the age of AI – Kyla Scanlon
‘Radical uncertainty’ and Trump’s tariffs – Behavioural Scientist
Trump Media is getting into BTC hoarding – CNBC [also GameStop]
Off our beat
How to become a fantasy sports millionaire [US ‘football’ but interesting] – Rolling Stone
Unhappy hour: the demise of after-work drinks – Slate
Why doesn’t North America speak French? – Unchartered Territories
The workload fairy tale – Cal Newport
The light beyond sight: exploring the universe – Aeon
Roche working on first breakthrough antibiotic in 50 years – Fast Company
Move to Portugal and become a crypto nomad – Coin Telegraph
Look east: a weekend in London’s new cultural quarter – Guardian
Gulp! Gen X to become elder statesmen and women – Dave Nadig
And finally…
“We begin our lives as growth stocks, but end our lives as value stocks.”
– Nick Maggiulli, Just Keep Buying
Like these links? Subscribe to get them every Saturday. Note this article includes affiliate links, such as from Amazon and Interactive Investor.
Certainly true in my case as an aged investor and long time retiree
Investing in Investment Trusts was a right of passage-full of fun and colourful interesting characters -who can forget the many erudite investment essays from Personal Assets Trust-making some money by getting into and out of the Turkey Trust was one highlight I remember
Investment Trusts also set up the first easy to manage SIPPs and ISAs for the amateur investor ie Alliance Trust Savings-an adjunct of Alliance Trust (now Interactive Investor) but….
I have however been in cheap global index funds (Vanguard) for many years now which has done the business for me-so far-cheap,easy to understand and manage with my personal limited mathematical and investment skills
Very boring however and I do miss the cut and thrust of Active Investing that Investment Trusts provided but it was not for me
I now get my excitement elsewhere than the stockmarket
xxd09
According to Feedly I’m one of only seven people who (still?) subscribe to the RSS feed, but I’d be heartbroken if it was kicked into the long grass! It’s so much easier to find all your blog subscriptions in one place. (Making it a member-only feature would indeed force me finally to crowbar open the pocketbook.)
@Jeep — Ah, you’re looking at the source feed, not the Feedburner feed which is the long-time proxy that delivers most RSS readers, and which suddenly borked a few weeks ago. If you search for Monevator in Feedly you should see it, with our M logo and note it has 5,000 subscribers. (Most inactive I’m sure).
For some reason the Feedburner proxy (https://feeds.feedburner.com/monevatorcom) stopped updating a few weeks ago. Feedburner won’t let me force refresh the original feed (which has http instead of https which I suppose could suddenly be an issue as of a few weeks ago?) or save the new one (with https).
I’ve tried Googling and ChatGPT-ing but to no avail so far. If any wizened Feedburner/RSS wizards are reading, please let me know what to do.
(And please do subscribe, at least to Mavens! 🙂 Membership is now the only thing that keeps the site going, as I’ll be bemoaning in a new membership drive on Weekend Reading in a few weeks, with the latest Google algo change further choking off our organic traffic and AI excerpts putting the boot in).
Thanks for the links TI, as ever. Been a while since I commented.
ITs were the Boomers investments and filled a gap. The first index trackers were camouflaged as ITs (and the argument rages on about how many ITs are just trackers). The idea of something tradable once a day opaquely priced makes me shudder in a way my father just accepted. And so the ETF reigns for now. Still not possible to buy everything an IT offered in a tracker ETF. Long may progress continue.
Very much enjoyed James’ How Rich Is Rich article. I’ve worked with him and he absolutely loves writing this stuff and the comments it generates. He is delightfully thoughtful and frivolously fun at the same time.
Finally a quick shout out for energy infrastructure. I am fascinated by renewables at the moment (UKW, BSIF) which are not quite bonds, not quite equities but seem to achieve the ludicrously implausible 9% inflation-linked return is a defensive sector. I’m gently in, but what in earth am I missing here, fellow readers? Management risk? Political risk?
Thanks for the links, I’m still catching up with the last one after our recent holiday!
I’ve got feet in both camps with passive ETFs and ITs with about 13% of my total portfolio in ITs, I like them for the predictable dividends in retirement. They’re in the ISA though and I’m not taking income from that yet, it seems pointless while I’m still moving GIA funds into the ISA. I might upgrade to Moguls to read the article but generally the Moguls stuff I consider above my pay grade (which is around zero these days!). Have you ever considered a one-off fee for us mere Mavens to read a paywalled Mogul article? I read the comments on them and get tempted, might just upgrade 🙂
On the environmental front, I was shocked to read the news that the Swiss alpine village of Blatten was pretty much obliterated by a glacier fall this week. It made sobering reading, we have walked the Gasterntal Valley just over the mountain from there. Climate change effects are not evenly distributed for sure https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-c7f929de-96a9-45e5-b1bb-31de82fce72d
I’m a recovering active investor. Investment trust junkie. Bought all the stories about ‘accessing digital infrastructure and fintech and biotech etc.’ They’re all busted flushes for me. Global passives for me now. Thank you.
@BillD yes, as well as the Swiss glacier article, this one on floods in Appalachia was an interesting read https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/appalachia-kentucky-floods-research-trump-cuts
I think the reason the feed isn’t working over https is a redirect loop. At https://monevator.com/feed it’s telling the browser to make another request to… https://monevator.com/feed. Fixing the redirect loop should mean you can use the https version of the URL in Feedburner.
Your RSS feed works fine for me in Feedly.com
Thanks for the RSS update.
Although I’m an e-mail subscriber I subscribe to the RSS on a delay so that I can come back later and see the comments too – often these can be as insightful as the articles.
Feedburner seems to be on a slow path to shutdown.
I’d recommend moving the RSS to a custom subdomain (https://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79586?hl=en) so that you can preserve the benefit of statistics and “bad bot” protection while also giving you flexibility to switch in the future without impacting your subscribers.
While the subscriber numbers may be few, RSS is also beneficial for SEO and bringing in new visitors to the site.
Don’t forget the RSS links in the sidebar and HTML header still point to feedburner at the moment!
>> If anything, bond markets are returning to normal – Bloomberg via AP
Yes, that’s my view if you zoom out to look back over 25 – 50 years, interest rates are returning to normal. It’s a good thing.
That doesn’t mean I’m not worried about what the orange buffoon comes up with next.
One of the biggest problems with ITs in recent years has been their large discounts as they have fallen out of favour. Returns have generally been poor as a result compared to passive vehicles and most boards have had little success at reducing discounts to, say, the levels seen 10 years ago. In the past, you might have ridden this out in the expectation that in due course discounts would narrow and revert to the mean. But it is difficult to see any prospect of discounts narrowing significantly in the near future, other than through aggressive actions by third parties as we have seen from SABA.
Returns matter, and like it seems many others I’ve been slowly swapping out of ITs into cheaper ETFs covering similar areas. There are a some areas where ITs might still have an advantage with a talented manager/team, e.g. Private Equity, small and micro caps, or infrastructure, but generally there seems little to lose by going passive.
Please keep the RSS feed going.
“The writing has been on the wall for RSS for years.”
I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve catalogued thousands of active blogs on my site and it’s very, very rare for me to come across one that doesn’t have an RSS feed. You might say the writing has been on the wall for blogs but, again, I don’t think that’s true – there are plenty, but they’re part of a landscape that includes many more formats of “content” than existed 20 years ago.
I’d still be following your feed myself except I need to subscribe by email to get the Mavens content.
Re Feedburner – the writing has been on the wall for that for years and I’m pleasantly surprised it has been working as long as it has. There used to be a way to redirect the Feedburner feed URL to a different one, so you could stop using it, but I don’t see it now. Unless deactivating the feed will redirect to your original “source” feed? There’s an email address in the reply of this discussion that might still work for assistance? https://groups.google.com/g/feedburner/c/zQrUec0fDIw/m/0k-0cCMtAwAJ
Thanks as ever for this excellent roundup. In case of interest, there is a quite political Middle East related banner popping up at the bottom when I read this on my phone. (I offer no opinion as to whether it’s good or bad politics, but it’s certainly capital P Political). Flagging in case it’s useful for TA and TI to know, as I vaguely recall you previously saying you try and screen the ads that the algorithms try to put on the site.
Thanks for all the feedback guys. Especially @Sam, assuming you’re not just getting my hopes up! 😉
(No worries if it doesn’t work, I appreciate all suggestions for a fix!)
Yes, perhaps ‘writing is on the wall’ for RSS is a bit over the top. But most younger people I know don’t use it any more, unless they’re very technical types. (I’m not saying you need to be technical to use it. I’m saying only techie types do in my experience.)
@TI and Sam
Not so sure about that redirect loop. My RSS feedreaders – I use two – a desktop application and an Android app on both phone and tablet – stopped showing any new Monevator blogposts after 20 May and these were connecting to the feedburner url.
What got my feedreaders showing posts since 20 May was to switch the connection to monevator.com/feed (I deleted and then reinstated the feed). However, it now only shows posts back to 3 May (this isn’t an issue for me) rather than last 200 items (default setting). However, this seems to be the solution to the issue (for me at least).
If you look at the feedburner url’s output, it shows that it was set to hourly updates and stopped doing that on 21 May for some yet-to-be-discovered reason.
NB I used to use feedly and out of interest I had a look earlier today…it’s not showing anything new since 17 May (it uses the feedburner source) but I was able to create a new up-to-date feedread by searching on monevator.com/feed (though curiously it goes back to 2 May, not 3 May which suggests we won’t all get the same results!)
Re “writing on the wall”: just because Google ‘sunsetted’ their Reader service a few years ago doesn’t mean that’s the end of RSS, TI 🙂
@faustus agree. Every IT manager I’ve heard on a podcast in the last 36 months has constantly spun these discounts as a ‘once in a generation opportunity to access such wide discounts…never before have we seen such value on offer…just you wait till these historic discounts narrow…then you’ll really feel the uplift…’
The more I read ex financial journalists saying we have to recycle the same stories, the more I realise the selling going on. The whole ecosystem needs to feed itself.
With ETFs I feel happier they’re not doing so at my expense.
The ermine heart of darkness struggled to find any sympathy for the FT’s James Max, who seemed to be on loan from the Telegraph. He will never be rich because he doesn’t know what enough looks like. And I expected better from the FT than the usual fail of conflating income with wealth.
Unless you inherit it or steal it, you need a high income to build wealth, but that’s not commutative. A high income does not necessarily lead to wealth, and it seems an awful lot of Londoners burn their high incomes on lifestyle trappings. The throwaway right at the very end
doesn’t really make up for it. I know he was taking the piss in some of it but it doesn’t make up for the high income = wealth fail. Necessary but not sufficient and all that.
Re 4 Mathmo
Had a brief look at BSIF. I don’t like that these renewables funds don’t have to publish proper consolidated financial statements.
The listed parent company’s (BSIF) financials only show its own assets and liabilities. 99% of the assets being the shares it owns in its immediate subsidiary, carried at a valuation based on ‘reasonable’ assumptions, which probably means it’s about as solid as a finger in the air.
BSIF itself has minimal liabilities, but as the financials aren’t consolidated it’s not clear what debt or liabilities are in the >150 individual operating subsidiaries at the bottom of the structure. There is some disclosure on debt costs etc., so if you’re diligent maybe it can be estimated, or else go to Companies House and try and find the financials for each individual sub (assuming they are all UK companies).
BSIF’s own P&L is mostly worthless. Most of the loss in the year to 30 June 2024 is an accounting charge to do with the valuation of the immediate subsidiary. The rest is a bit of interest income and a chunky amount of admin expenses.
The most interesting bit is the cash flow statement (where they didn’t even put the right date). That dividend is funded from receipts from the subsidiary, of which about half is cash for debt principal repayment to BSIF. Which raises the question as to whether the group is just moving capital around or actually earning sufficient profits to fund the dividend. There may be a good reason to structure the cash transfer that way, hard to tell.
Bottom line is that it all comes across like a bit of a black box. I’m surprised the regulators allow them to not prepare consolidated financial statements. Combined with the hefty management fees, it’s not clear that this is the bargain the dividend yield makes it sound. A lot more due diligence needed.
Ah, yes, ITs, another thing of not much interest to those younger than Gen X. And mostly with reason. A few sectors bemoan the absence of ‘stars’ in modern life, replaced by anonymous, efficient teams. And when those stars are people like Woodford, that’s understandable.
But I miss Harry Nimmo, Simon Knott, Anthony Bolton, Ian Rushbrook. Hugh Young and Susie Rippinghall annualising at almost 20% over 10 years out East! Mark Barnett as an amazing Woodford protegee for equity income. And let’s not forget the first 15 years of Lindsell Train (and Capital Gearing Trust until recently). Not that I was invested in all of them, but I have read and learned a lot from them. Anyway, excuse an old-timer’s (God, is that really Gen X…) reminiscences!
However, I don’t count out the sector completely. Ashoka and Nippon Asset Value have been recent highlights. Pershing was good until the political utterances became too much for me. I don’t know how many people have noticed but Scottish Oriental is having a bit of a revival – the new manager needs to prove himself, though he was co-manager for a while before, so should be OK. Vietnam Holding has amazing long-term figures again, though it’s still too small, and I have a bugbear about the overly-generous fees the directors take for its size. In my fever dreams, somebody like Findlay Park would start a trust – US trusts are so lacking… That’s my area – I can’t really comment on the Alts.
@Phil Gyford #14: thanks for an amazing blog link compilation site! 🙂 I’ve been looking for something like it for years. Some really great & quirky ones in there.
The “tax raid” link is useful to show how political campaigning works in the UK. The CityAM piece is very similar to a Lib Dem press release from the same day, and other similar pieces appeared in the Times, KGB News, Yahoo, MSN and various other portals and social media.
The playbook:
– Have a “study” written for your cause (there are always “think tanks” = lobby groups secretly funded by your rich mates).
– Write a press brief and have your PR agency spray it across their contacts. Many will publish and copy your wording because it’s effortless content.
Voila, the veneer of “journalism”.
– Criticise and accuse, never acknowledge trade-offs or offer practical solutions; and never, ever say who will lose out if you get your way.
– Use performative outrage and plenty of hyperbole. The tax you don’t like is always a “raid”. The continuation of an ages-old status quo is a “bombshell”. The tax is “ripped away” (out of the emaciated hands of those wretched top-quartile earners).
The language gives away the PR campaign, and googling a few key phrases confirms it. We really need a better public discourse. Regarding the budget, anyone who asks to spend more or tax less should be required to say how they will pay for it. If enough voters demand intellectual honesty, then I suppose the parties will change. One can hope…
Perhaps I’m not best placed to comment being a professional Northerner but I couldn’t help laughing at the idea of leaving London due to the cost of living and only making it as far as Kent. Am I right in thinking that’s always going to be a frying pan/fire situation?
IT wise my only real involvement was to scratch a PE itch with the NAV discount just too tempting to ignore. I know, PE valuations are a dark art so who knows if the NAV is fair or not but still felt worth a shot. For general equity investing though surely a themed ETF can match the yield at lower cost?
Well, the threat of no more RSS (and no more Monevator) was enough for the sub…. now the question is, can you access the members-only articles via RSS?
Finally a chance to sit down and enjoy the conversation here properly.
Sadly we haven’t figured out the RSS issues yet. The loop thing seems to be a red herring. More work tomorrow, with ChatGPT on hand!
A few replies:
@xxd09 — Personal Assets Trust’s newsletters are still a good read, albeit under a newer generation. Not to say they get everything right (or on time) of course but they’re never flippant and always thoughtful, and mostly agreeably humble. 🙂
@Jeep — Thanks so much for becoming a member! (And to the half a dozen others who’ve signed up today, quite the surge 🙂 ) We are continuing the RSS investigations as I say. Alas I think you’d have to log into the site (or read via email) to see the member content. But I never use RSS so not certain how it handles log-ins etc.
@Mathmo — Nice to hear from you. Yes, I like James’ articles, and also the portfolio reports from the HSBC banker guy who got fired for being anti-ESG, forget his name. A lot of FT columnists are interesting in that they’re disagreeable at first but you come to get a taste for them. Like some interesting umami-ish flavour. Janan Ganesh is particularly excellent. As I mentioned in my recent Moguls piece (and I need to go back to address a comment left on that on the subject, just remembered) I am nervy about renewables trusts. I have some tiny exposure but I would never go large. The structures are a bit opaque. The energy market is opaque! I haven’t tried to model out their cashflows from depreciating assets, but I fear small assumptions going haywire in the numbers as you get more than a few years out. They also used to expand on fund raising at a premium, like infrastructure, but now they’re at a discount and there’s a danger of some kind of wind-down or gentle disinterest from management. I do have a bit of TRIG and UKW but as I say, modest in the extreme versus the superficial attractions. I wouldn’t bank any of these points I’m making though, I haven’t spent a week researching the sector properly say (I wish!)
@BillD @tetromino — Thanks for Maven-ing! I think you can upgrade for a month to Moguls if you want and then downgrade again. But I’d rather you didn’t. (Or rather, I’d rather you just upgraded… :)) Perhaps this is only if you’re on a monthly membership though, not sure. I’m thinking of putting the Mavens monthly fee up at some point, as some people clearly use it like your suggesting, which is understandable but not really sustainable from our point of view in terms of underwriting what we do here. 🙂 Re: Blatten, that article is incredible, yes. The before and after! Glaciers melting away and yet we have denialists even among the smart readership of Monevator ho hum.
@NMH @Faustus — The exotic stuff is definitely the riskiest stuff. But I wouldn’t write off the sector based on the past few years alone (if you are). The dislocation caused by higher rates has been carnage, but it won’t last forever IMHO. Still, nobody *needs* ITs these days, as you are proving yourself.
@PC — You’re looking at the ‘new’ / source feed I think, not the feed burner proxy that 5,000 are subscribed to. 🙂
@Huw — Hmm, I’ll look into that. It could be worth moving to something more stable if we can bring the subscribers with us. Especially if it also fixed this issue! Re: the links, yes I mentioned that in the article, but thanks. 🙂 We’ll change if/when we are sure we know what’s going on.
@PC — It’s a head scratcher…and I’d prefer they were returning to normal under a boring competent President. If only Jamie Dimon had gotten the job!
@Phil Gyford @Syrio — Good points as I think I replied earlier today. We’re trying to find a fix, and will support RSS for as long as it’s relatively painless to do so. 🙂
@Andy D — We have less influence on ads than we used to, and mostly ads are driven by a combination of our content and what a web browsing individual has been looking at elsewhere. Perhaps you’re politically engaged in some way that is provoking those ads (maybe as an opponent, I’ve no idea). Personally I’ve not seen them here myself. Thanks for the heads up though!
@Curlew — Yes, I think ‘something happened’ four weeks or so ago, but I’m having the hardest time finding out what. Of course it could be ‘feed burner broke’ but haven’t found any other reports.
@ermine — Well yes, I think he does write with his tongue half in his cheek. Equally, he is very different from you and I for sure! As I say I’ve grown to appreciate what he’s doing with the column but it’s catering for an audience that isn’t really us haha.
@xalion — Interesting, and puts more scaffolding on my groped-for concerns, cheers. (To be clear I’ve never looked closely at BSIF so I can’t comment on the structures etc. But this is the sort of thing that concerns me generally. Amongst other things!)
@tom_grlla — You might want to look at a few of the small trusts, too, especially the Harwood stable and also Onward Opportunities, which I think is run by someone who touched the edges of their circle. They’ve hit a bit of an air pocket recently but on a relative basis they’ve all been pretty interesting for a few years. (Not a recommendation to invest, obviously! Just for further personal research.) Scottish Oriental has an excellent long-time record too I believe, from memory.
@Sparshwein — Yes, nonsense labelling like the bedroom tax or the pasty tax does proper discussion and debate no favours, but unfortunately it cuts through to a generally disinterested and ill-informed public. I’m not sure the operation is quite as clinical and coordinated as you suggest, but I recognise the outline in the practical results.
@Steve B — Haha. Well Kent isn’t on the tube (I think) so it’s already beyond the pale for a proper 20/30-something Londoner thinking of making their exit. Probably felt like going to Mordor for that author when she did the deed 😉
@anyone-I-missed — Sorry, this took about 45 minutes already but cheers for commenting. For me, Andor season 2 continues!
Thanks @xalion and @ti for thoughts on those and pointers for where to do more research. Some interesting fundamentals (cost of infra dropping, consumption steady, price inflation linked) but as you observe, utterly opaque. Which is where bad things hide. Last time I got badly burned was Zeros which were opaque and mismanaged…
@TI – Kirk is the columnist. The kind of article that makes you wish you could put a few quid in the “anti-Kirk” etf to trade against his trades. He recently got called out by a reader with an investment idea which he then touted in a column (and which performed) and promised lunch. I can tell you he failed to deliver… 😉
@Mathmo — Hah! 😉 (Was it the listed P/E one?) I don’t know that I’d go to him for actionable insights…he worked for a global bank and seemingly doesn’t understand how fund currency denomination / currency risk works (https://monevator.com/currency-risk-fund-denomination/) which he reveals in an article that’s basically about currency/geographic risk. It’s understandable to make a mistake once, goodness knows I do that all the time, but he’s made this mistake repeatedly and been called out for it.
But set against that he’s got a very distinct voice, a great turn of phrase, and he’s entertaining…
IIRC (and we are going back nearly a decade), the way to unstick Feedburner feeds was to swap it for another RSS source temporarily, wait for it to come through, and then set back to the original.
Back when I had a business dependent on RSS, I would have several feedburner feeds with the same RSS source and swap out non working ones for working ones in the blog configuration. Probably happened a couple of times a year on average.
Looking on H-L’s site Bluefield has gross gearing of 79% vs Greencoat UK Wind gross gearing of 33%. I used to hold the former and another highly geared solar investment trust but sold out of both. Still hold Greencoat and Foresight Environmental Infrastructure which seem less opaque and less geared.
The issue I have with many investment trusts is that they are doing too little, too slowly, to narrow their discounts to NAV. It smacks of being far too focussed on delivering continuing fees to management companies and not caring for their actual investors’ returns.
It’s perfectly reasonable for investment trusts, which are typically small and illiquid, to find their market prices deviating from NAV by a large amount. Most especially during a major market repricing, such as we saw in 22/23 in bond yields. It’s not reasonable, however, for very large discounts to persist for years at an end.
If you are operating on a big discount to NAV for a extended period, it’s time to sell the bloody assets, take the uplift back to NAV and launch a new trust. If they cannot sell those assets to crystallize uplift to NAV , then the NAV is clearly wrong. Which in many, such as some infrastructure ITs, I suspect it is. Liquidity is actually worth something and they need to own up and accept that in their NAV estimates.
Congrats on fixing the RSS feed! I’m subscribed via http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Monevatorcom, and it delivered this post today. Will change my reader configuration to the new address (https://monevator.com/feed). You might want to update the link in the yellow column on the right of the website, under “Get Money Motivated” – it’s still pointing to the old feed.
You can’t possibly be serious about subscribing by email – email is for 1 to 1 communications, RSS is for 1 to many. Emails that violate this end up in spam.
As for RSS dying out… podcasts run on RSS. That’s how they’re available in multiple apps at the same time. Most people use RSS without knowing it’s RSS. It’s the same with email – most people have never heard of SMTP
Tunguz link – “hyperscalers are deploying more than $300b in capex this year to fund data centers..What is the marketing rationale behind this framing? A new industrial revolution?”
Seriously, how’s this going to earn decent returns? Open AI spent $9 bn on compute for $4 bn revenue last year.
What if LLM’s turn out not to be bigger than the industrial revolution, just mundane utility?
Nvidia/TSMC/ASML aren’t lightweight digital distribution. They’re Capex heavy hardware and, in 2024/5, they aren’t like Apple in 2012/3 (with $40 bn FCF, $135 bn in the bank and a $430 bn valuation then). They’re more like Apple now, on >30x PE.
Inference just might increase compute demand 1,000x, as Tunguz suggests, but if the business case isn’t obvious then this is the biggest gamble in history.
I can’t see ads helping either, as recently suggested (including by Altman). Alphabet might make $175 bn annually from seach ads, but it has 9 bn to 14 bn searches/day (90% share). Contrastingly, the LLM market is fragmented, and it’s hard to see where the quasi monopoly comes in.
Bit reminiscent of all the hype in the immediate pre iPhone era about ad supported mobile gaming, the next big thing of its day, which we were all going to be hooked on.
Either we move on from hallucinating LLMs towards mass commercial adoption of real AI agents (using different approaches to machine learning), and see mass substitution of human cognitive labour; or this the GOAT of busted flushes.
@TI – actually PR operations are often more sophisticated and coordinated than that, eg I haven’t even started on social media strategies.
Saying this from my experience as a dilettante PR agent during the pandemic and again to support Ukraine in the early days of the Russian invasion. It needed to be done, it made more sense than arguing with morons on Twitter,
and it’s powerful when it works. We raised a few 100k in donations off stories in the Times and the Guardian.
From Perplexity: “The public relations and communication activities industry in the UK had an estimated revenue of £4.7 billion in 2024, according to IBISWorld. This figure specifically covers public relations agencies and related communication services, excluding conventional advertising and marketing.”
The product of this industry is what people think “their own” political priorities and opinions are. A little critical thinking goes a long way.
– Is the language appropriate for the subject? A serious journalist would never use terms like “raid” or “bombshell” unless it really is the next Watergate.
– Have the same turns of phrases been used across multiple media outlets within a few days?
– Who wants me to believe this, and why?
@Howard. I find it very difficult to separate the hype from the reality with AI. Altman is buying Ive’s io startup for $6.5bn. Altman suggested that the acquisition could increase OpenAI’s value by $1 trillion, envisioning a family of devices with the first appearing in 2026. Yet, Altman is also saying that in 12-24 months we will have AGI (or ASI), and AI will have outstripped a human’s ability. So why buy a Ive’s design house if your OpenAI will be designing better stuff itself within 24 months?
Altman is the worst example. Plus he has very dead eyes. Why do so many of the tech bros come across like sociopaths? There is an obvious answer …
@Howard, @ZXSpectrum48k: Ed Zitron has plenty of invective to spew towards Altman and his ilk, much of it justified. Techno-feudalism is its own reward, and you’re either in on the grift, or a mark. Thankfully this sort of thing seems concentrated in the US but the miasma is seeping into everything tech. Even my beloved Register is now shilling AI courses.
@ZX #35: either recent SV vox pop tracts (like ‘AI 2027’ & ‘Situational Awareness’) are on the mark, and we’re at the precipice of a phase transition which will define the pathway of not just humanity, but of sentience itself, throughout our particle horizon / Hubble volume until the Heat Death; or this is the most expensive, overrated auto complete that could ever be devised.
If it’s the former, then we should be pausing all AI research immediately until we can be confident that alignment is fully sorted, as the alternative is an extinction level risk.
But if the latter turns out to be the case, and we’re stuck with non-scaling LLMs, then no boost to economic growth can come without novelty and discovery, and an unreliable summariser and collator won’t deliver that (just as in the 1990s the impact of the internet turned up everywhere but in the productivity stats).
Mundane utility is primae facie more plausible sounding than tech singularity or apocalypse; but, then again, it’s an N = 1 situation with observer selection effects. We don’t get to know the probability distribution ex ante or ex post (if we make it).
If it is just mundane utility, then there could still be money to be made long term, but it’s then likely to be 1994-99 now (in the run up to the crash of 2000-02), and not 2012-13 in the run up to 2021.
In 2012-13 you didn’t need to guess the future. Apple & FB were on low absolute valuations (Apple on a minus cash pile P/FCF of 8). Good things didn’t have to happen to make money. Likewise with Meta in Q4 2022 (P/E approaching 8).
We’re definitely not starting from there now.
Agreed, I noted the same thing to complete disinterest on X the day the deal was announced… 😉
https://x.com/Monevator/status/1925251275953700918
Re: the photo of the two of them on X: can see what @ZX means about the dead eyes. Jony looks chill with the deal though 😉
“Not for profit” Altman’s not got many fans left in the EA community (Less Wrong et al), that’s for sure.
Is this AI gadget pivot just ‘shiny object syndrome’ for VC / Softbank cash burn, like Elon with the ever receding Robotaxi future (don’t focus on FSD, it’s all Mars and Starship now, or is that Optimus and Robots?)
Edison and Brunel didn’t carry on like this.
Well RSS seemed to start working again so whatever you did looks like it worked.
@jds247 — Yep, but I don’t want to declare victory until we have successfully picked up a new post with it…
@TI – thanks – I hadn’t heard of Onward – looks interesting, I’m going to dig in, though the AUM for liquidity & bid spread makes it look pretty uninvestable?
Yes, forgot about Harwood – proper pedigree stable! Seems like Widdowson has been supplanted by Staveley as the golden boy, but imagine that could change – both impressive.
Another RSS subscriber here. RSS will rise again!
@tom_grlls — Yes, horrible spread, horrible liquidity, and usually on a premium. However I was able to trade into my small (just over 1%) position and am now usefully ahead by double-digits. But yes, it’s not optimal. AUM has been growing quite quickly though, by actually issuing shares at a premium (imagine!)
I think it’s best to think of it as a start-up. The downsides are as we’re discussing. The upside is the manager is able to get into small situations and affect real change, which has played out in returns to-date. Very early days though.
Are high yield GBR domiciled ITs still, on the face of it, the most tax efficient investment type to hold a basket of shares for a UK family investment company or for any other UK small company with retained profits wanting to invest in the stock market?
@Always Late #45: @Finumus covered FICs on MV back on 2/2/2023. There’s now a long comment thread with ideas etc – plus @Finumus own thoughts of course. Looking at the Qualifying Territory list @Finumus refers to in INTM412090, my suggestion there of EC (Columbia) would qualify, but not PBR (Brazil).
I might be an old programmer and a Luddite, but I strongly prefer an RSS feed to an email subscription. How strongly? Well, I won’t use an email subscription, full stop 🙁
That said, in Feedly currently, the “new” feed of https://monevator.com/feed shows 23 subscribers (and BTW, it’s broken in the browser, it is set to download content instead of rendering as xml). The old one with http://feeds.feedburner.com/Monevatorcom has 5k subscribers – feels like it would be a shame to lose them. It is also the only one listed in the page headers on this website (well, with the http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Monevatorcom variant).
I’m with @Picolo, like most other technology, millions of people use RSS, very few know about it.
@skolima — Yes, the ‘new’ one is really just the source feed, feedburner is a proxy that we set up to try to avoid loads of hits on our server all the time.
I thought I’d fixed this issue but sadly it proved a temporary fix. I *think* I’ve got the new post out into RSS today after more hitting the side of the machine, but it’s not shown up for me in Feedly yet. However it is showing in the RSS HTML.
There are more than 5K feed subscribers I believe, I think that’s just the results from one Feed reader (Feedly? But I could be wrong) and agree it’d be a shame to lose them.
However through the lens of site sustainability (sadly a huge issue nowadays, with higher workloads and massively diminished Google organic traffic as discussed many times) readers via RSS have to be at the bottom of the priority chain. They read the site without ads and they are not being monetized through email. Sounds mercenary but if everyone read through RSS I’d have to shut the site down for sure. :-/
But as I say we’re not there yet, and I intend to fix this problem if I can!
@xalion #20 In note 2c of their annual report they claim they are “not permitted to consolidate” due to IFRS10 (investment entities have to hold subsidiaries at fair value).
This seems disingenuous as they could always produce consolidated accounts in addition for transparency.
Help – Aviva are cancelling their preference shares the Aviva ones paid out nicely but the GA ones seem to have lost 30% of their value today.
They are due to be delisted on the 6th, is this part of the delisting process, did something happen the buyback, is it a buying opportunity? I “accidentally” bought £20k….
Can’t find anything online about it