Hargreaves Lansdown - how good is there managed performance?

happyhero

Hi I have a NISA, a SIPP and a fund and share account with Hargreaves Lansdown all with a mixture of shares and funds in them and they keep offering to manage them for me, i.e. do the choosing and buying and selling but what I really need to know is what are they likely to achieve, i.e. can they do better than I manage.

Can anybody whose with them as a managed customer or knows anything about it tell me what percentage they grew your portfolio for you in the last few years per year please.

Also how active was their trading within your accounts?

I would love to think they are professionals at this and can achieve way above the average amateur investors attempts but is this the case? I think they only way to judge this is if some customers with presently managed accounts can tell me more.

Any info appreciated as I googled this and found nothing helpful really.

colsten

happyhero wrote: »

I would love to think they are professionals at this and can achieve way above the average amateur investors attempts but is this the case?

They'll obviously know more than an amateur investor, simply because it is their daytime job.

This doesn't mean that they could beat a passive investor as there is no historical evidence that active investments, regardless of who performs them, ever does over a longer period of time.

masonic

I think you are right to have doubts. If they had a great story to tell, you'd already have heard it.

happyhero

colsten wrote: »

They'll obviously know more than an amateur investor, simply because it is their daytime job.

This doesn't mean that they could beat a passive investor as there is no historical evidence that active investments, regardless of who performs them, ever does over a longer period of time.

What I am trying to say is I would no way consider myself a professional investor so I consider myself an amateur but at the same time I do reasonably well with my amateur methods and so I would like to know if their managed service will better my efforts and if so by how much.

Also I think there would be history for me if I had a few case histories to look at to judge past performance by HL, I appreciate things like this change constantly but if you had 2 or 3 friends saying to you that they had been with them 5 or 10 years and had achieved more than 10% growth on most of those years would you not be tempted to get in on some of those because it looks promising?

From what I have managed to gleam on googling and past experiences it does not seem to me that financial managers commonly achieve anything that I would call spectacular, ok they sometimes do ok but rarely way above expectations, I'm sure this will come across wrong but hopefully you see what I am getting at. They don't seem to be the masters of trading that you expect them to be, being that they are the professionals.

So without a few case histories to convince me otherwise, I feel I may as well stay with my own methods rather than pay the professionals but obviously I worry I am doing the wrong thing.

happyhero

masonic wrote: »

I think you are right to have doubts. If they had a great story to tell, you'd already have heard it.

Exactly what I was thinking.

colsten

happyhero wrote: »

I would like to know if their managed service will better my efforts and if so by how much.

My view is as I have already said - there is no historical evidence that active investments, regardless of who performs them, would beat passive investments over any significant period of time.

Probably not what you would like to hear, but it is still my opinion.

Linton

colsten wrote: »

My view is as I have already said - there is no historical evidence that active investments, regardless of who performs them, would beat passive investments over any significant period of time.

Probably not what you would like to hear, but it is still my opinion.

A properly balanced portfolio tailored to the individuals requirements is better than one chosen at random by an inexperienced investor no matter whether passive or active funds are chosen. Just because a fund is passive doesnt make it appropriate. Just because a fund is active doesnt make in inappropriate.

But in the OPs case unless he has a large amount to invest (£n00K) I would question whether a managed service is required, and if it is I would question whether H&L are the right people to provide it.