investment mismanagement by bank...please help and advise

ifor

About 10 years ago,when i was 38 the manager of my high street bank introduced me to their private banking division. in my naivity i joined them and gave them 190k to invest. During a fact find i told them that these funds were for my childrens further education and my retirement. i needed growth and no income. they suggested i opt for decretionary management and their fantastic team of investment specialists would do the rest and that the investment period was right for equity based investments.
Initially there was acceptable growth then the dot com crash and a significant reduction in investment value. they did not take any active steps to protect this slide. the upshot being that now after nearly 10 years of this active management my portfolio stands at about245k. this amounts to less then 2% growth over the years. i have been charged nearly 25k in fees from the capital for this dubious management. during this time my portfolio has been handled by various managers in fact three managers in the last 2 years and none of them seem to have grasped the lack of performance. during a recent meeting with yet another manager he accepted that the growth has been terrible but blamed the markets and the recession and suggested that i should sell all the individual shares in the portfolio and invest in fund of funds to be managed by them. for this privilage they would charge me 3k+ in fees !!
Now that i am older and have come to my senses i feel that something is not right. i feel that this specialists have let me down. what can i do ? do i have a cause to complain to someone/ some regulatory body. is this private bank in any way responsible for this mismanagement ? any advise and suggestions would be most welcome as the childern are on threshold of university and i am getting older !!

dunstonh

do i have a cause to complain to someone/ some regulatory body.

No

is this private bank in any way responsible for this mismanagement ?

There has been no mismanagement. The decisions havent been good for you but they could have been. Poor performance is not grounds for complaint.

any advise and suggestions would be most welcome as the childern are on threshold of university and i am getting older !!

No suggestions as it's too late now. However, for others reading this, things to note are: Never ever go to a bank for financial advice. Even the independent arm of the bank (even more so really). Their own product ranges are usually very poor, quite expensive and in cases where they have a brand link with a major insurer, the products are often cut down versions of the indpendent product or more expensive than the independent product.

In your case, you choose the independent arm and would have paid a fortune in fees over that period of 10 years which you would not have paid had you gone to a local independent advisor. You were probably paying in excess of 1% a year in fees on top of the built in fees on the funds/shares/dealing. Banks also tend to have a reputation for switching too frequently and incurring fees each time. I took over a portfolio that had been managed by a certain private bank with a horse as the logo. They were charging around 2% a year on top of the full charges. Banks dont have to be competitive. It comes to them handed on the plate. Inexperienced customers are their ideal target.

With hindsight, you could have picked a local IFA, with that amount been dealt with by the owner/partner/director and had the same person deal with it all the way through. It would have been cheaper and performance would almost certainly have bettered what you got.

You will probably have to chalk this one down to experience as they havent done anything (at least from what you have said) which could be classed as a complaint.

EdInvestor

ifor wrote:

During a fact find i told them that these funds were for my childrens further education and my retirement. i needed growth and no income.

This was your mistake.Growth funds/shares were the place to be in the second half of the 90s during the tech/TMT boom. But when the bubble burst, growth funds and shares were emphatically NOT the place to be - it was income shares and funds that weathered the storm and produced the increased returns.

You may have noticed that FTSE has still not regained its losses from the market crash - that's because the growth stocks are still in the red.

The charges won't have helped, but with the brief you gave them, the result was inevitable.Some might say they have managed quite well under the circumstances.

Frankly, there's no substitute for DIY. Unlike what you may have been led to believe, it's not rocket science and doesn't take too much time, once you've worked out what you want to do.Definitely worth making the effort for a quarter of a million quid