The Bogleheads forum is buzzing with news that Vanguard has set up an Alternative Strategies Fund in Dublin and filed for “exemptive relief” to allow its US Managed Payouts Funds to invest in the newfangled creature.

Vanguard is cherished by its investors partly for sticking to simple investing formulas that keep costs as low as possible. It is unsettling for them to see the mutual fund group setting off down a path labelled “alternative”. It smacks of hedge funds and other horrors. Continue reading "Vanguard goes all alternative"

The exchange traded fund industry has been feted as offering low cost access to a wide range of investment opportunities. It has occasionally had its knuckles rapped for getting over-enthusiastic about short and leveraged products that may not track in the way investors expect. But generally, the plain vanilla FTSE 100 or S&P 500 ETFs have been seen as A GOOD THING.

 Now along comes Watson Wyatt to throw a bucket of cold water on the ETF party. The consultant says institutional investors can get a better deal elsewhere. There are institutional index products with lower fees, a better tax structure, and less or no counterparty risk. Continue reading "Careful with that ETF says Watson Wyatt"

If any fund manager deserves an award for trying to change the world, or at least start a real debate, it must be Hermes.

The fund manager, owned by the BT pension scheme, the UK’s biggest, today co-hosted a conference with the lengthy title: Creating sustainable wealth through responsible asset management and ownership.

Last week, it handed out awards for transparency in governance, in collaboration with the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (ICSA). Continue reading "Hermes tries to change the world"

The blog posts on websites read by UK independent financial advisers are alive with objections to comments by Andrew Fisher, outspoken chief executive of Towry Law.

Mr Fisher runs a fee-based advice outfit, but revealed recently that his firm gets £6m a year in trail commission on legacy business it inherited from firms it has taken over. Towry Law does not provide a service in return for this money - an example of how it is possible to earn money for nothing in the strange world of financial advice. Continue reading "Money for nothing"

Praying for a market miracle

The revelation that the Church of England is relying almost exclusively on returns from equities to pay vicars’ pensions in the future raises an interesting question: which institutions can afford a sufficient time horizon to be able to rely on the expectation that equities will outperform bonds over the longer term? Continue reading "Praying for a market miracle"

Despite the academic hours put into debating whether active fund managers outperform, no one has definitively won the argument it seems.

The debate has been fuelled recently by papers from Eugene Fama and Kenneth French (Luck versus Skill in the Cross Section of Mutual Fund α Estimates) and Laurent Barrat, O. Scaillet and Russ Wermers ( False Discoveries in Mutual Fund Performance: Measuring Luck in Estimated Alphas).

Neither make good reading for active managers. Continue reading "Active managers: lucky, skilful, or useless?"

Hewitt risks raising expectations too high

Most days I can rely on a communication from some investment consultant or other landing in my inbox bemoaning something about pensions.

Today it is Hewitt Associates, which quotes some nice round figures about the danger of 15,000 people in the UK losing at least 20 per cent of their pension benefits if trustees of defined benefit schemes do not “take control of investment strategy”. It says £150m of pension benefits are at risk over the next two years. Continue reading "How to invest your way out of a deficit"

Bedlam Asset Management is worried about ETFs. Our colleagues on FT Alphaville have already noted their concerns so I won’t go into detail. Suffice to say that Bedlam thinks parallels can be drawn between the evolution of ETFs from simple low cost product to complex sophisticated product with hidden costs and the expansion of securitisation that eventually led to the sub prime debacle.

Bedlam is an active manager so doesn’t use ETFs. But the possibility of a fraudulent operation being discovered and causing a run on gold, for example, as people sell out in a panic would have wide repurcussions. So it is alerting the market to this possibility. Continue reading "Why ETFs are dangerous"