Hargreaves Lansdown HL Portfolio+ vs Vanguard lifestrategy

JohnRo

The performance of an active fund is subject to the performance of the stocks it contains, which is about the managers ability to select how many and how much of what he or she perceive as winners.

I know I'm stating the blindingly obvious and it's nothing you haven't heard a thousand times but those same winners will be in a tracker by default, at least if you're making broadly similar comparisons in broadly similar sectors, where the option to do so is available. So the tracker will benefit just as much from any performance within those stocks, though clearly to what extent overall depends of the ratios. Whilst it will suffer the performance drag from dogs it will also at some point benefit from rising stars within the index which the manager of a fund may or may not spot.

I'm still not quite totally convinced about trackers but where there is that option I think it's very difficult to present a compelling argument against them when fairly compared with a managed alternative.

That's why I've chosen to use separate equity/bond/property portfolios which endeavour to follow the different styles exclusively rather than me trying to mix, match and balance both styles into one.

I've taken a lazy view, expecting that reinvestment and rebalancing will take care of market cycles and pretty much everything else, in both cases, over the longer term. I'm not aiming for world record performance though and do also have investments in P2P which I'll apply the same reinvestment and rebalancing ethos to as the portfolios, internally and externally.

coastline

SabNys wrote: »

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Regarding the debate about the performance of "active" versus "passive" funds, here is a recent link from FT, March 20, 2016. Because of the date format, maybe it's the the US Financial Times:

https://www.ft.com/content/e555d83a-ed28-11e5-888e-2eadd5fbc4a4

The title is "86% of active equity funds underperform"

BTW: If you need to log in, try clearing your cookies. For me, it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't - like my investments.
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Just out of interest I looked at something similar recently on Trustnet using the following links comparing the MSCI World Index against the listed 3146 Unit Trusts and OEIC's..
MSCI World over 1, 3 and 5 years is showing 24.3%, 44.9% and 104.2%.
In 1 year MSCI World sits at no 565 out of 3146 listed funds.
Over 3 years its showing at 300 and over 5 years comes in even better at position 231.


https://www.trustnet.com/Tools/Charting.aspx?typeCode=NM990100,NASX

https://www.trustnet.com/ratings/?univ=O

https://www.trustnet.com/ratings/?univ=O&Fr_Submit=true&moreresult=true&Fr_sortedColumn=P60M,UnitNameFull&Fr_sortedDirection=DESC

AlanP_2

dunstonh wrote: »

Single sector investing is bad whether it is active or passive. The best option for fire and forget is multi-asset.

Agree and point taken Dunston - I should have said "passive" as opposed to "trackers", although VLS (which is partly what this thread is about) does generically get lumped in as a "tracker" quite a lot on here.