Hargreaves Lansdown - tomorrow's winners

mutley74

sheslookinhot wrote: »

The Sunday Times ran an article in recent weeks about the underperformance of absolute funds

Thanks i tried searching for the article but with Times online one needs to register with them!
think this is the title of the article you are referring to
Nina Montagu-Smith: Absolute truth — these funds are for losers Dec 2010

Old_Slaphead

StevieJ wrote: »

If that Psigma income fund can be in the top H&L 150 then anything can, terrible performer.

I had the misfortune to invest in this (& NS Select Opps in a similar vein) - it really opened my eyes to HL recommendations! I take a fairly jaundiced view on heavily promoted "star managers"

Fortunately I avoided New Star Heart of Africa!

Nanpy

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

I liked the look of this absolute fund by L&G maybe:

Legal & General European Absolute

Anything specific you like about it? It's got a decent 1 yr return, but past performance and all that...

I've about half my portfolio in bog simple L&G trackers, mostly swapping in and out of the fixed interest fund when I get antsy about markets and want to park my money. I like the low transaction charges but the above, obviously, charges along the lines of most managed funds.

StevieJ

dunstonh wrote: »

Fashion investing

I guess they are designed for a falling market not a rising one, I like the hybrid Artemis Strategic, OK with the rising, I wonder how it will cope with the falling.

StevieJ

thrupence wrote: »

Bestinvest do a rather interesting fund manager rating where they assess whether a manger was just lucky in his choices or did he actually actively add value. Dunno how they work this out, but you can access it here: http://www.bestinvest.co.uk/investment-research/manager-research/top-managers.aspx But the other interesting thing is that even their top rated managers don't beat the benchmark index by anything like the charges they make for their funds. Typically a top manager might add a value of 0.8% per annum for example, but be charging 1.75% for his services and that's without all the other trading charges that are involved in fund management. I suppose you just have to look at fund charges as as an expense incurred, which is reasonable enough.

I note that Gibbs was measured against the Rag, Tag and Bobtail specialist sector and was + 1.33%, if he had been been measured against other purely financial funds you would have seen a very different result. His was truly a great performance during the previous crash, although he hasn't handled the rising markets quite as well.

koru

StevieJ wrote: »

I note that Gibbs was measured against the Rag, Tag and Bobtail specialist sector and was + 1.33%, if he had been been measured against other purely financial funds you would have seen a very different result. His was truly a great performance during the previous crash, although he hasn't handled the rising markets quite as well.

Are you sure that is what they have measured him against? Although they have said that he is in the specialist sector, they have measured his Financial Opportunities fund against the specific FTSE index for global financial companies, as you can see here:
http://www.bestinvest.co.uk/investment-research/fund-research/fact-sheet/jupfin/jupiter-financial-opportunities/performance

Unless they are measuring the relative performance of the fund in a different way from the relative performance of the manager, they do seem to be using pretty specific comparator indices. I am quite impressed by this analysis they are making available, given that it is provided free, even to non-clients.

Jake'sGran

mike88 wrote: »

I have always found the best way to track funds is to track the manager. They move around so tracking funds is inheently dangerous.

You can do this here:

http://citywire.co.uk/money/fund-and-fund-manager-performance/-/unit-trusts/global-emerging-markets/fund-manager-league-table.aspx?CitywireClassID=45&RankModelID=8&IsSectorDefaulted=True


On this page you can change the sectors to find the best managers. Its a good research tool but those who use it do so of course at their own risk.

Please note I'm not recommending anything so this advice comes with all the caveats possible.

I agree with Mike88 about tracking the fund managers and am therefore surprised that the list does not include Angus Tulloch's First State Asia Pacific Leaders.

Also, I feel sure that ten years ago the list will have included Jupiter Income but this is another one that is it the bottom section of a list of similar funds.

koru

Jake'sGran wrote: »

I agree with Mike88 about tracking the fund managers and am therefore surprised that the list does not include Angus Tulloch's First State Asia Pacific Leaders.

Also, I feel sure that ten years ago the list will have included Jupiter Income but this is another one that is it the bottom section of a list of similar funds.

That First State fund was only launched in 2003, so it would not have fitted the point of the HL article, which was to suggest that you could have made massive gains over the last decade if only you had followed certain of their recommendations in 2000, such as JPM Natural Resources, (and you also had the foresight to realise that you should only have followed certain of their recommendations and should have ignored all their other recommendations which turned out to perform averagely or to underperform).

Edit: I am not even sure if HL were recommending these 15 funds in 2000. I can't find the article any more, but if I remember correctly they did not explicitly claim that these were recommendations from 2000. Rather, they simply claimed that these were current Wealth 150 funds that have delivered astonishing performance over the last 10 years and they implied that they are likely to continue to do so over the next 10 years (and therefore be “tomorrow's winners", as they put it).

Jake'sGran

Sorry, I am always going off at a tangent - tend not to get my facts straight first.

I always use HL for buying funds but make my own choices and pleased to say that there is nothing negative right now. Today I received an email from Trustnet advising that Invesco Perpetual Income has lost it's three star rating.

koru

Jake'sGran wrote: »

Today I received an email from Trustnet advising that Invesco Perpetual Income has lost it's three star rating.

Which only goes to show what a complete waste of time their star ratings are. It is based on three-year performance, which I think tells you nothing meaningful in terms of likely future performance. Neil Woodford's reputation is based on making good long-term calls and having the nerve to stick to his guns even if he is temporarily falling behind the market. He has had other periods of underperformance, which presumably meant that he lost three star status then, but so far he has come good in the long run. Whether he will come good again I have no idea, but I am convinced that the fact that there has been some short-term underperformance is no reason to assume he has lost his touch. I would lend much more credence to his long-term performance over his entire career, as per the Bestinvest data.