St James Place Pension Fund - Stay or Transfer to a SIPP

MPN

dunstonh wrote: »

Bowlhead reminded me that you didn't take the advice back at the time but self selected and chose SJP (that was a daft decision and you are correct to regret that). However, the differences are still mostly down to your fund selection. So, it is unfair to criticise SJP in this case (something you dont say often!).

It may be not have been but it may have been.. I use the VLS funds and I create bespoke portfolios. The bespoke portfolios tend to outperform VLS but I still use VLS with some people as it is best for them. There is no guarantee that the bespoke portfolios will continue to outperform VLS and in some periods they wont because the asset allocations are different. I have never used and would not use a global equity exc UK fund in isolation with an investment. So, there is really no point comparing returns against one.

Absolutely. if you build a bespoke portfolio then you need to keep ongoing reviews with it. It will lose balance. The allocations will change and sometimes you have to change funds as many single sector funds suit different parts of the economic cycle. If you are not going to do that or pay for someone to do that for you then you should use a multi-asset fund.

Please see my reply to Bowlhead above.

bowlhead99

MPN wrote: »

Thank you for your reply which is always welcome and appreciated. First of all I did say that I was using the L&G index fund as an index example regardless of whether it is ex UK or not, it could be any world index such as VWRL, VLS100 etc. etc.

Sure, but you should be careful making such generalisations because all indexes are quite deliberately not created equal, and that feeds into performance expectations and reasonableness for benchmarking.

For example, over the last 3 years you would have got 47-48% from a world ex-UK index such as vanguard dev world ex UK, or L&G's international index trust (one has engaging markets and one doesn't, but it didn't make much difference in that particular time period.

However over the same period you would have only got 42-43% from a global inc-UK index such as vanguard's VWRL, which is similar to what SJP's own International fund delivered (also being global inc-UK).

So, a clear 5% difference in that time period from a fund that excludes your home market - because it was a market that lost serious value on the world stage due to a surprise event.

As such, even if the extreme view to go 100% global equities was adopted as a strategy, you can't consider all global funds to be equal, because the non-UK version of those funds are even higher risk, so the fact that they had a high return can be disregarded because virtually no UK adviser would recommend them to be held in isolation.

The original funds that I had for over 4 years linked with my risk score of 8 (medium to high) was Global Managed (20%), UK Equity (20%), UK & International Income (20%), Strategic Managed (15%) Schroder Managed (15%), Far East (5%) Global Emerging Markets (5%). At this time I solely took the advice and recommendations of my advisor mainly because he's the professional and I didn't have the time so I thought it best to heed his advice.

Ok, I'm with you now in terms of where the allocations came from.

You had a professionally constructed highish risk set of funds with individually targeted allocations, which:

a)included allocations to non-equities such as bonds,

b)and a significant allocation to UK equities (dedicated UK equity fund, a relatively large part of a UK and international equity income fund, and part of two managed mixed asset funds)

c) you also had some of the equities being "equity income" in style which might be expected to provide reliable income rather than highest growth.

That sort of construction, while being high risk because of the high equity content, is not completely irrational or "made up as you go along" and without knowing a great deal about SJP's processes or initial discussions with you, I could see it might suit a number of UK-based investors that favour an 8-10 level of risk.

However, what you probably can say with some certainty, without looking up any of the components in detail, is that after the market conditions we saw in the last 5 years [major UK devaluation event, equities soundly beating bonds, lower performance from traditionally higher dividend payers such as oil, minerals and banks...], the factors a, b and c would all restrict the portfolio's performance compared to a super high risk raw global ex-UK index.

This is because the high risk raw index entirely excluded the UK, excluded bonds, and did not have any volatility moderators such as a tilt to income. Even a proper global index that included UK would have not had a massive amount of UK if driven by global market cap, so would still have beaten the advisor-suggested portfolio by some way, due to not tilting your returns towards the country you live in and the currency you pay bills in. The UK tilt is a conventional thing to do when planning for a UK resident's retirement, and not some bungling error by SJP.

When I had a meeting/review with my new advisor he basically recommended I carried on with this portfolio maybe with a minor few tweaks.

Makes sense if your needs have not fundamentally changed.

It was only then that I mentioned the returns had not been that great and that there were other SJP funds that had consistently performed significantly better over a very long period of time such as North American, Greater European and as you mentioned the International Equity Fund. We had a constructive chat about these funds and he agreed that these funds were good performers but a higher risk which was OK with me

So, this is the part where you are in danger of messing up sensible allocations by being annoyed that your reasonably well balanced risk 8 portfolio did not do as well as a really really raw world tracker or as well as a few single sector funds that happened to do well over a long period of time historically while offering high risk.

You already had EU and US exposure within your portfolio but added some more, and you further tilted the allocations away from the UK with the addition of another general international fund which had under 10% in the UK and yet more US and Europe and others.

The FA didn't stop you doing that because he is happy to be led by you if you'll sign off that it's what you want, but it wasn't what he had suggested.

so we agreed to change funds and since then the returns have been much better but so has nearly everything in the markets over the past 3/4 months. I must say that when SJP publish their quarterly returns all of my original funds with them apart from Global Managed has continued to under perform even to this date.

The UK currency continued to decline in favour of US and others, together with a US market rally, so it is not surprising that adding further non-UK equity exposure delivered gains. Just looking at a watchlist set up at end of July, one pretty mainstream US fund is up 11%, another up 15%. Meanwhile Woodford equity income (high UK bias, income bias) is down 2%. Bonds and real estate are down or flatish (government bonds particularly down recent weeks).

So, since your tweaks, the portfolio had some gains and because it was weighted a bit more towards the stuff that was going up, it would have got closer to that non-UK equity index fund that you're using as an arbitrary benchmark. But still, the portfolio holds a bunch of stuff that didn't happen to go up in this particular quarter, as much as the index you were looking at - because the portfolio has bonds and UK stuff and income stuff.

You say that all the original funds continue to under perform on the last quarterly report. But

(a) they are not necessarily underperforming versus an appropriate benchmark for what they're doing, merely against your "should have got a high risk tracker" mentality. And

(b), this duration of the "continuing" poor performance you are talking about has been just three months. You should never try to review funds over short timeframes. If you draw a five year chart, SJP's international equity fund comes out ahead of the L&G International index, proving that over the right cherry picked timeframe they have funds which can beat a target, despite high fees and an exposure to declining sterling which did not adversely effect the L&G ex-UK fund

I'm definitely not trying to apportion any blame merely stating that for my risk score I feel I could have been better advised on my original set of funds that were recommended by my previous adviser.

As mentioned, that original set of funds from the previous advisor was probably not too ridiculous.

It held assets that were not as volatile as a raw world index; it had a generous weighting to UK whereas with hindsight it would have been great to have only taken a 0-5% exposure to UK if we had known the referendum result in advance; and it would have been great to not bother with bonds if we had known there wouldn't be a major equities crash; and to not bother with equity income if we knew growth equities and specifically the US market would pan out nicely.

But that sort of stuff is unknowable in advance. A few years out from expected retirement most advisors would not put someone in a set of funds with virtually no UK assets and no non-equity holdings, even at a risk level 8. That sounds like level 10 territory to me!

The poor bit was signing up to the expense of SJP and picking your portfolio "improvements" on a whim, even if the latter appears like it helped.

MPN

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Sure, but you should be careful making such generalisations because all indexes are quite deliberately not created equal, and that feeds into performance expectations and reasonableness for benchmarking.

For example, over the last 3 years you would have got 47-48% from a world ex-UK index such as vanguard dev world ex UK, or L&G's international index trust (one has engaging markets and one doesn't, but it didn't make much difference in that particular time period.

However over the same period you would have only got 42-43% from a global inc-UK index such as vanguard's VWRL, which is similar to what SJP's own International fund delivered (also being global inc-UK).

So, a clear 5% difference in that time period from a fund that excludes your home market - because it was a market that lost serious value on the world stage due to a surprise event.

As such, even if the extreme view to go 100% global equities was adopted as a strategy, you can't consider all global funds to be equal, because the non-UK version of those funds are even higher risk, so the fact that they had a high return can be disregarded because virtually no UK adviser would recommend them to be held in isolation.


Ok, I'm with you now in terms of where the allocations came from.

You had a professionally constructed highish risk set of funds with individually targeted allocations, which:

a)included allocations to non-equities such as bonds,

b)and a significant allocation to UK equities (dedicated UK equity fund, a relatively large part of a UK and international equity income fund, and part of two managed mixed asset funds)

c) you also had some of the equities being "equity income" in style which might be expected to provide reliable income rather than highest growth.

That sort of construction, while being high risk because of the high equity content, is not completely irrational or "made up as you go along" and without knowing a great deal about SJP's processes or initial discussions with you, I could see it might suit a number of UK-based investors that favour an 8-10 level of risk.

However, what you probably can say with some certainty, without looking up any of the components in detail, is that after the market conditions we saw in the last 5 years [major UK devaluation event, equities soundly beating bonds, lower performance from traditionally higher dividend payers such as oil, minerals and banks...], the factors a, b and c would all restrict the portfolio's performance compared to a super high risk raw global ex-UK index.

This is because the high risk raw index entirely excluded the UK, excluded bonds, and did not have any volatility moderators such as a tilt to income. Even a proper global index that included UK would have not had a massive amount of UK if driven by global market cap, so would still have beaten the advisor-suggested portfolio by some way, due to not tilting your returns towards the country you live in and the currency you pay bills in. The UK tilt is a conventional thing to do when planning for a UK resident's retirement, and not some bungling error by SJP.


Makes sense if your needs have not fundamentally changed.

So, this is the part where you are in danger of messing up sensible allocations by being annoyed that your reasonably well balanced risk 8 portfolio did not do as well as a really really raw world tracker or as well as a few single sector funds that happened to do well over a long period of time historically while offering high risk.

You already had EU and US exposure within your portfolio but added some more, and you further tilted the allocations away from the UK with the addition of another general international fund which had under 10% in the UK and yet more US and Europe and others.

The FA didn't stop you doing that because he is happy to be led by you if you'll sign off that it's what you want, but it wasn't what he had suggested.


The UK currency continued to decline in favour of US and others, together with a US market rally, so it is not surprising that adding further non-UK equity exposure delivered gains. Just looking at a watchlist set up at end of July, one pretty mainstream US fund is up 11%, another up 15%. Meanwhile Woodford equity income (high UK bias, income bias) is down 2%. Bonds and real estate are down or flatish (government bonds particularly down recent weeks).

So, since your tweaks, the portfolio had some gains and because it was weighted a bit more towards the stuff that was going up, it would have got closer to that non-UK equity index fund that you're using as an arbitrary benchmark. But still, the portfolio holds a bunch of stuff that didn't happen to go up in this particular quarter, as much as the index you were looking at - because the portfolio has bonds and UK stuff and income stuff.

You say that all the original funds continue to under perform on the last quarterly report. But

(a) they are not necessarily underperforming versus an appropriate benchmark for what they're doing, merely against your "should have got a high risk tracker" mentality. And

(b), this duration of the "continuing" poor performance you are talking about has been just three months. You should never try to review funds over short timeframes. If you draw a five year chart, SJP's international equity fund comes out ahead of the L&G International index, proving that over the right cherry picked timeframe they have funds which can beat a target, despite high fees and an exposure to declining sterling which did not adversely effect the L&G ex-UK fund



As mentioned, that original set of funds from the previous advisor was probably not too ridiculous.

It held assets that were not as volatile as a raw world index; it had a generous weighting to UK whereas with hindsight it would have been great to have only taken a 0-5% exposure to UK if we had known the referendum result in advance; and it would have been great to not bother with bonds if we had known there wouldn't be a major equities crash; and to not bother with equity income if we knew growth equities and specifically the US market would pan out nicely.

But that sort of stuff is unknowable in advance. A few years out from expected retirement most advisors would not put someone in a set of funds with virtually no UK assets and no non-equity holdings, even at a risk level 8. That sounds like level 10 territory to me!

The poor bit was signing up to the expense of SJP and picking your portfolio "improvements" on a whim, even if the latter appears like it helped.

Than you for that Bowlhead and yes what you say all makes sense!

From my perspective, I am just trying to 'find my feet' at the moment and feel I would like to move away from SJP because although my main advisor offered a balanced portfolio the returns over a number of years to the scale of charges isn't exactly great. I'm not suggesting at the moment that I could do better but with enough research I'm hoping to be able to go into my own SIPP. I suppose I'm also in the very fortunate position of being able to have a high risk exposure to this particular pension pot because of my other cash/investment assets.

On the Pensions Forum in the SIPP Advice Thread most people were suggesting to the OP that either a VLS80 or a VWRL would be most appropriate for his entire pension fund (I have invested my ISA allowance for this year in the VWRL)? Therefore, just as with my ISA investments I was thinking of having a mixture of passive and active funds in my pension pot if I transferred to a SIPP, however I haven't really got that far as yet because I'm still researching and learning.

I have no intention of transferring from SJP to a SIPP unless I feel comfortable in my future methods. I suppose I'm looking for a reasonable high risk (8) balanced portfolio with a scope for growth long term so initially I thought a tracker could do this for me but I had no idea it was far more risky than individual active funds (Trustnet seem to place trackers as medium risk so that threw me of course).

Anyway, thank you for your pointers, it is greatly appreciated for a novice and a good learning curve for me as I need solid constructive critique!

Frufru23

MPN wrote: »

On the Pensions Forum in the SIPP Advice Thread most people were suggesting to the OP that either a VLS80 or a VWRL would be most appropriate for his entire pension fund (I have invested my ISA allowance for this year in the VWRL)? Therefore, just as with my ISA investments I was thinking of having a mixture of passive and active funds in my pension pot if I transferred to a SIPP, however I haven't really got that far as yet because I'm still researching and learning.

Since starting the thread, I have just about moved all of my funds in to the VLS80, I have around 20% remaining in the World Tracker. It's pretty much the same across the Sipp, S&S ISA and the children's JISA's. I guess only time will tell whether I've done the right thing, by which time, it will be too late to do anything about it.
But, I'm feeling happy with the decision and I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders since making the decision.
I'm happy that I no longer plan to trawl the websites, forums, newspaper articles etc looking for fund reviews and constantly second guessing which ones I should be invested in.
I have all of mine under my Charles Stanley account.

bowlhead99

MPN wrote: »

I have no intention of transferring from SJP to a SIPP unless I feel comfortable in my future methods. I suppose I'm looking for a reasonable high risk (8) balanced portfolio with a scope for growth long term so initially I thought a tracker could do this for me but I had no idea it was far more risky than individual active funds.

Comparing a tracker to a portfolio of individual active funds is not apples to apples. But basically a tracker only 'tracks' one index at a time, so by its nature is not going to be diversified across different types of assets, even if it says it tracks 4000 stocks.

E.g., clearly if it is a FTSE UK AllShare or S&P500 tracker or Russell 2000 tracker it is only tracking that particular equity index in that particular country so is missing all sorts of other regions, sectors or asset classes.

But even if you were to buy an All-World equities tracker, you are still only getting exposure to equities and no bonds, and using large-scale companies not small ones, and have nobody controlling or monitoring how much is exposed to what area. E.g., emerging markets expands from 7% to 10%, USA expands from 61% to 68%, nobody is going to say "hang on a moment let's reign that in a bit"; you just go into the next year with 10% EM and almost 70% US, even if you think those are higher exposures than you're perhaps comfortable with.

Individual active funds are not necessarily lower volatility than a tracker for their respective sector - some are deliberately higher or deliberately lower depending on their strategy. But if you coordinate individual funds together with some logic in a broad portfolio and more importantly have them hold different types of assets, you can create something that may be a better blend for your needs.

Some multi asset funds will use either trackers or active specialist funds as building blocks for the product, just as an IFA might use multiple passive and/or active funds as building blocks for a portfolio, blending them to target a particular level of performance or volatility. In doing so they will deliberately move away from the return characteristics of (e.g.) one simple dumb tracker. They don't guarantee they will get the absolute highest performance over any specific time period compared to that simple dumb tracker, but aim for a more suitable result along the way.

(Trustnet seem to place trackers as medium risk so that threw me of course)

The trustnet risk score is quite simplistic and for example rates something on recent performance using FTSE100 as the baseline "100" score.

So, if you have a period where FTSE100 is particularly volatile, pinging around between 6000 to 7000 on a whim as we have referendums, foreign government policy and elections and exchange rate swings, oil price arguments in Iran and Russia etc, and we know that the FTSE100 is not very sectorally diversified anyway (banks, oil, big pharma while missing other entire industries), it might be that some foreign or global or sector-specific index is lower scoring than the FTSE.

This doesn't mean that tracker funds are by their nature low risk or low volatility. They just didn't look like they were too wild in that particular snapshot of time, versus one particular index as a comparator, but the general trends over 20 years could be quite different.

It is pretty bad sometimes when people come on this site and say things like "I'm putting my toe in the water with a first S&S ISA, I'll just be getting something simple and pretty low risk, probably a FTSE100 tracker". This is because the level of investment education among the general public is shocking and people are drawn to big names they've heard of (e.g. FTSE100 is announced on breakfast telly every day, so how intimidating can it be?) and because investment firms only draw them a 5 year chart when they are making their fund choice and the FTSE didn't lose 40-50% in any year within the last five.

Obviously the truth is that it could crash 50% by end of next year and take half a decade to recover properly (maybe longer depending on brexit effects). So, time after time we have to politely point out that investing all in one regional tracker, especially the FTSE, is terrible. You are not proposing to do that of course but the general principle is that you must really do your research before diving in to investing in bright ideas of what "looks good" on a short term chart or FE risk score.

Good to see you feel you are learning. There's always more to learn.

One obvious point to make : your blended portfolio from the SJP FA didn't perform the same as the index you looked at, which was inevitable because of its different positioning. But also you mentioned it was expensive to get that performance in terms of advice costs etc. So, one thing to look at of course if you are not ready to SIPPit yourself, is to get an IFA that doesn't charge through the nose for his advice and doesn't use mega expensive funds from a limited pool of affiliated managers, but can still sort you out with a sensible "risk 8/10" portfolio rather than just lumping it into VWRL. Presumably you could have some sensible discussions with an IFA for a few years before eventually taking some or all of it over yourself.

On the Pensions Forum in the SIPP Advice Thread most people were suggesting to the OP that either a VLS80 or a VWRL would be most appropriate for his entire pension fund (I have invested my ISA allowance for this year in the VWRL)

Be careful not to take that out of context and say that an arbitrary selection of either of those two funds for your entire pension would be the very best thing you could do, or that VWRL is a good all in one fund for an entire pension or ISA.

In context, the OP there had suggested a confusing mix of VLS and a separate world tracker and an EM fund and a large slice of region-specific exposure that happened to have given decent returns. Scrapping all that in favour of a multi asset, performance targeted solution in one simple fund (eg VLS from Vanguard or other similar "core holding" multiasset products from other managers) is certainly more straightforward and easier to keep on top of. That's not to say it is exactly what an IFA would have prescribed but it can be ok for someone who understands the consequences of buying it.

Using VWRL as the whole pension would have been a less coherent solution as it is equities only with uncontrolled floating allocations between regions. So I wouldn't suggest anyone have that as the only thing in a pension or ISA.

For you, maybe VWRL is fine as this year's ISA allocation if you do not want other asset classes and you have loads of other cash and investments and you understand it will drop by 50% as it tracks the markets down when they fall that far from time to time.

racey

A fundamental question - how to know if an IFA is any good?
I've looked at the websites of several that are local and they all sound good. They all have excellent feedback - nothing less than 4 out of 5.

dunstonh

A fundamental question - how to know if an IFA is any good?

It is actually easy. Do they sound as if they know what they are doing. Can they explain things easily without deflecting the questions. Is there structure and reason behind. Do they cover potential negatives and disadvantages and not just the positives.

IFAs are not investment managers. The advice is about structure and suitability. If they build a portfolio of funds, what is the structure behind it. Is is a model that has actuarial research and analysis and kept up-to-date or is it a random selection of funds with no structure. Can the IFA explain the model/structure and reasons in a way you understand.

You dont need to know the specifics or even understand all of it to the same level as the IFA. However, you should be able to tell if it makes sense or sounds reasonable as a lot of that is common sense.

racey

If, having spoken to the IFA and reached the stage where it is not convincing, you have incurred a charge which is non-refundable.
Is that correct?
It might be necessary to talk to several which would be expensive if this is the case.
Or is it accepted practice to have a preliminary discussion without incurring any costs?

bigadaj

You'll get a free initial meeting with the ifa, when you outline your situation, get a feel for the individual and should get an idea of their proposed general approach.

The problem is you won't get the detailed strategy and analysis until a second meeting and the ifa will want to be paid for that as the risk is you'll say thanks very much and head off with his plans to do it yourself.

MPN

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Comparing a tracker to a portfolio of individual active funds is not apples to apples. But basically a tracker only 'tracks' one index at a time, so by its nature is not going to be diversified across different types of assets, even if it says it tracks 4000 stocks.

E.g., clearly if it is a FTSE UK AllShare or S&P500 tracker or Russell 2000 tracker it is only tracking that particular equity index in that particular country so is missing all sorts of other regions, sectors or asset classes.

But even if you were to buy an All-World equities tracker, you are still only getting exposure to equities and no bonds, and using large-scale companies not small ones, and have nobody controlling or monitoring how much is exposed to what area. E.g., emerging markets expands from 7% to 10%, USA expands from 61% to 68%, nobody is going to say "hang on a moment let's reign that in a bit"; you just go into the next year with 10% EM and almost 70% US, even if you think those are higher exposures than you're perhaps comfortable with.

Individual active funds are not necessarily lower volatility than a tracker for their respective sector - some are deliberately higher or deliberately lower depending on their strategy. But if you coordinate individual funds together with some logic in a broad portfolio and more importantly have them hold different types of assets, you can create something that may be a better blend for your needs.

Some multi asset funds will use either trackers or active specialist funds as building blocks for the product, just as an IFA might use multiple passive and/or active funds as building blocks for a portfolio, blending them to target a particular level of performance or volatility. In doing so they will deliberately move away from the return characteristics of (e.g.) one simple dumb tracker. They don't guarantee they will get the absolute highest performance over any specific time period compared to that simple dumb tracker, but aim for a more suitable result along the way.

The trustnet risk score is quite simplistic and for example rates something on recent performance using FTSE100 as the baseline "100" score.

So, if you have a period where FTSE100 is particularly volatile, pinging around between 6000 to 7000 on a whim as we have referendums, foreign government policy and elections and exchange rate swings, oil price arguments in Iran and Russia etc, and we know that the FTSE100 is not very sectorally diversified anyway (banks, oil, big pharma while missing other entire industries), it might be that some foreign or global or sector-specific index is lower scoring than the FTSE.

This doesn't mean that tracker funds are by their nature low risk or low volatility. They just didn't look like they were too wild in that particular snapshot of time, versus one particular index as a comparator, but the general trends over 20 years could be quite different.

It is pretty bad sometimes when people come on this site and say things like "I'm putting my toe in the water with a first S&S ISA, I'll just be getting something simple and pretty low risk, probably a FTSE100 tracker". This is because the level of investment education among the general public is shocking and people are drawn to big names they've heard of (e.g. FTSE100 is announced on breakfast telly every day, so how intimidating can it be?) and because investment firms only draw them a 5 year chart when they are making their fund choice and the FTSE didn't lose 40-50% in any year within the last five.

Obviously the truth is that it could crash 50% by end of next year and take half a decade to recover properly (maybe longer depending on brexit effects). So, time after time we have to politely point out that investing all in one regional tracker, especially the FTSE, is terrible. You are not proposing to do that of course but the general principle is that you must really do your research before diving in to investing in bright ideas of what "looks good" on a short term chart or FE risk score.

Good to see you feel you are learning. There's always more to learn.

One obvious point to make : your blended portfolio from the SJP FA didn't perform the same as the index you looked at, which was inevitable because of its different positioning. But also you mentioned it was expensive to get that performance in terms of advice costs etc. So, one thing to look at of course if you are not ready to SIPPit yourself, is to get an IFA that doesn't charge through the nose for his advice and doesn't use mega expensive funds from a limited pool of affiliated managers, but can still sort you out with a sensible "risk 8/10" portfolio rather than just lumping it into VWRL. Presumably you could have some sensible discussions with an IFA for a few years before eventually taking some or all of it over yourself.


Be careful not to take that out of context and say that an arbitrary selection of either of those two funds for your entire pension would be the very best thing you could do, or that VWRL is a good all in one fund for an entire pension or ISA.

In context, the OP there had suggested a confusing mix of VLS and a separate world tracker and an EM fund and a large slice of region-specific exposure that happened to have given decent returns. Scrapping all that in favour of a multi asset, performance targeted solution in one simple fund (eg VLS from Vanguard or other similar "core holding" multiasset products from other managers) is certainly more straightforward and easier to keep on top of. That's not to say it is exactly what an IFA would have prescribed but it can be ok for someone who understands the consequences of buying it.

Using VWRL as the whole pension would have been a less coherent solution as it is equities only with uncontrolled floating allocations between regions. So I wouldn't suggest anyone have that as the only thing in a pension or ISA.

For you, maybe VWRL is fine as this year's ISA allocation if you do not want other asset classes and you have loads of other cash and investments and you understand it will drop by 50% as it tracks the markets down when they fall that far from time to time.

Thank you bowlhead great post/advice as usual.