new Woodford Income Focus Fund

AJ16

What do people think about the new Woodford fund? HL were promoting it for some weeks before it launched, its done nothing yet but they have listed in in their Wealth 150 yet don't list one single holding. On the other hand they don't list Fundsmith??

george4064

AJ16 wrote: »

What do people think about the new Woodford fund? HL were promoting it for some weeks before it launched, its done nothing yet but they have listed in in their Wealth 150 yet don't list one single holding. On the other hand they don't list Fundsmith??

The reality is, the Wealth 150 is biased due to marketing and other business reasons..

AnotherJoe

It certainly makes a mockery of the W150 if they put in brand new funds that have zero track record (and that must, by definition have bumped another fund out even though that will have a track record)

ColdIron

New funds in the W150 have been a feature for quite some time
With reference to the OP I have a slot for an extra UK ish equity income fund so will be giving his Focus fund some consideration

bowlhead99

AnotherJoe wrote: »

It certainly makes a mockery of the W150 if they put in brand new funds that have zero track record (and that must, by definition have bumped another fund out even though that will have a track record)

Well, it won't necessarily have bumped anyone out from their marketing list, especially not anyone who is still incentivising them to promote their funds via lower management fee rates or whatever. New fund launches are welcome because it is not just top historic performance over a multi-decade history, it's 'best-in-class' performance potential... which is subjective. Not at all biased to the funds with marketing sweeteners or exclusive / semi-exclusive discounts which take the investors' minds of their own high fees, honest guv.

There aren't a fixed amount of 150 funds in the 'wealth 150'. There's just over 90, of which about 60% are in the '150+' (and of those, about a quarter to a fifth are trackers, that all give 'discounts' on the management fees).

The average discount on the 94 members of the Wealth 150 in terms of reduced management fees is 0.13%. The two Woodford funds are at discounts of 0.15% (for the class available at HL versus the class most commonly available elsewhere). If cost was the only consideration, most investors would do better picking one of the vast numbers of investment providers whose platform fee is 0.30% or below instead of their 0.45%, and then not being biased into picking a particular fund just because it had a management fee 'saving'.

Mojo71

HL take manager performance into consideration, not just fund performance. In this case, Woodford has a dependable track record, so they'll hope that continues.

Their own Multi-Manager fund choices place a lot of emphasis on a seven-year track record of the fund manager(s), so there's often lots of funds I'd like to see included, but are excluded if they don't yet meet their performance timescale criteria.