There seems to be no stopping the rising tide that has lifted every asset class – including bonds – since the market lows back in March 2009. I’ve been in this industry longer than some fund managers have been alive and I can’t remember a period like it, when everything went up together.
Gary Waite and Andrew Morgan, managers of the Walker Crips Managed Portfolio Service range, state that the more boring their funds are, the better, and that if they suddenly start shooting the lights out, they would worry they had taken on too much risk.
Based in Leeds, Richard Bullas’s team goes its own way, and in the five years he has been running the Franklin UK Smaller Companies Fund, this investment strategy has gone from strength to strength.
By refusing to become overly focused on regulation at the expense of its clients, Ravenscroft’s Stephen Lansdown, Mark Bousfield and Mark Harries believe their Channel Islands-based firm has hit on the magic formula.
A culture of loyalty is central to Sarasin & Partners, which has many employees that stay for decades, including partner and head of private clients Jamie Black, who says the firm’s position has changed little since it set up in the ’80s.
Fidelity’s James Bateman contemplates the potential end of the decade-long bull market and explains why he still considers equities to be more attractive than fixed income, despite the challenging landscape.
Glancing at the titles of my past few blogs, you could be forgiven for thinking I’m a ‘glass-half-empty’ kind of guy.
The Mifid II directive continues to dominate headlines, ahead of the all-important January deadline.
Justin Onuekwusi, lead manager of Legal and General Investment Management’s multi-index fund range, talks passives, scaling up and being ‘relatively cautious’.
Tcam’s Haig Bathgate is a self-professed “glass-half-empty Scot,” with a tendency to look at the downside to get a true understanding of risk before investing, but he is also contrarian, sussing out corners of the market where others fear to tread.
Since Stephanie Butcher took the helm of Invesco European Equity Income, the politics of the region have been in turmoil. But the trials seem to have abated and she is now reaping the rewards of shrewd value approach.
Central banks have upped the rhetoric in recent weeks, with all but the Bank of Japan hinting at rising rates and/or winding in quantitative easing. It seems a strange time to be talking this way – just as the hard economic data looks to be in danger of peaking.
