Vanguard direct to customer offering confirmed

hennerz

dunstonh wrote: »

I seem to manage it regularly. As do many other investors in the UK.

Many others? There are billions in AUM with underperforming fund managers!

dunstonh wrote: »

over 10 years

I just posted sourced data over the last 15 years! Then you reply with no sources and cherry picked data over a 10 year period.

Your data "looked at “growth” funds, those that aim simply to increase in value over time, and did not include income funds".

It also does not take into account survivorship bias.

It compared vs the "best performing" 10 year old tracker for each segment over the period, we are not told which trackers and the article itself goes on to say:

Is our data reliable?
Yes, but as Prof Blake said, the bull market since 2009 may have helped active funds.
...At the start of that period tracker funds were much more expensive than they are today. This will have put their average cost over the period up and reduced their returns after fees were taken into account.
“It will be a different story over the next 10 years. Active funds now have a much bigger hurdle to beat, given that today the cheapest trackers cost as little as 0.09pc and active funds tend to charge 1pc.

You should be looking at the SPIVA scorecard for evidence.


https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-europe-scorecard-year-end-2016.pdf?force_download=true

The article you quote is from 5th April 2015. Here is what one evidenceinvestor.co.uk had to say about the 2016 year results...

Nearly nine out of ten UK active equity funds underperformed their benchmark over one year. The exact number is 87.22%, which represents a four-fold increase on 2015.

UK active funds have also fared poorly over longer periods, with 61.64% of funds underperforming over three years, 50.0% over five years and 74.19% over ten.

Average UK active equity fund performance also lagged the benchmark over the calendar year, with active funds delivering an average annual return of 11.15%, which is 5.95% less than the S&P United Kingdom BMI over the same period.

Think about that for a moment. The average active fund underperformed the index by almost 6%. Clearly the S&P United Kingdom BMI isn’t an investable index; there is a cost to investing in passively managed funds, but that cost is very small compared to what an active investor pays in fund management charges and transaction costs. In effect, that means active investors need their chosen fund managers to outperform the index this year by almost as much they lagged the index last year just to keep up with a typical passive investor.

For the industry, these figures clearly aren’t good. 2016, we were told, provided near-perfect conditions for active managers to outperform, and yet they failed miserably.

No, the performance of UK fund managers is not significantly worse than managers elsewhere. For example, 88.25% of euro-denominated actively managed European equity funds have underperformed the benchmark over ten years. But it’s clearly wrong for anyone, including my fund retailer friend, to suggest that UK managers are somehow immune to what is very much a global problem of active underperformance.

http://www.evidenceinvestor.co.uk/2016-uk-fund-managers-annus-horribilis/

If you are going to read one link from my post, make it the last one. The evidence is clear. 5 likes to your poor response is laughable also, literally shows why the hedge funds are still lapping up people's hard earned money only to underperform the markets.

MonroeM

Audaxer wrote: »

How do we know which actively managed funds are best, as I thought we can't really use past performance as a guide? Seems even more difficult to know what selection of active funds to pick for a portfolio to beat a good multi-asset passive fund. For instance, can you list a portfolio of actively managed funds (or a mixture of active and passive) for a £100k investment with an overall 40/60 equity/bond allocation, that can better a VLS40 over the long term. I'm not saying there isn't one, but if it's that easy to identify such funds I'd be interested in knowing what would be the best active and passive funds to include in such a portfolio.

IMO you have to do your own research. A good point about past performance, as a guide, because VLS funds have only been around the a limited period in investments terms of about 5 years whereas for example you can track most active funds back over a 10 year period. Also, we don't know if VLS will outperform its competitors like L&G Multi Index or HSBC Global Strategy funds over a longer period - only time will tell?

I personally hold quite a few active funds in different geographical regions and am more than happy with the performance even after fees, however, I also hold some passive funds (and not all of these are Vanguard) therefore the new Vanguard platform is not really suitable for me with a portfolio of different funds from a diverse range of sectors and geographical regions.

The new Vanguard platform is absolutely great for Vanguard products/fans but less interesting for people who like to hold a diverse range of funds from many investment companies. Although, I do totally agree that reducing the platform charges for a percentage fee based platform can only be good for the industry as a whole so come on Fidelity please 'reduce your platform fee'!

BananaRepublic

dunstonh wrote: »

I seem to manage it regularly. As do many other investors in the UK. Mainly as they are not blinkered to the passive bias that some people like you have. Where passive is best, it should be used. Where managed is best, it should be used.

I also manage it regularly. In one case the outperformance is dramatic. Without doubt most active funds underperform the target index/sector.

MarcoM

has anyone started their transfer from HL yet?
I am wondering what approach HL will take on this. Do you guys think they will reduce their fees within a matter of weeks or not?


I would like to move to vanguard but I am concerned about the possible level of customer service I may encounter.


Like other posters on here, a few months ago I emailed them to
ask if they offered ISAs and it took them 4 weeks to reply to my mail...

moneyfoolish

I know other platforms can be cheaper but are any cheaper if you are putting in monthly amounts or lump sums at various unknown times in a year?

BananaRepublic

hennerz wrote: »

Many others? There are billions in AUM with underperforming fund managers!



I just posted sourced data over the last 15 years! Then you reply with no sources and cherry picked data over a 10 year period.

Your data "looked at “growth” funds, those that aim simply to increase in value over time, and did not include income funds".

It also does not take into account survivorship bias.

It compared vs the "best performing" 10 year old tracker for each segment over the period, we are not told which trackers and the article itself goes on to say:




You should be looking at the SPIVA scorecard for evidence.


https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-europe-scorecard-year-end-2016.pdf?force_download=true

The article you quote is from 5th April 2015. Here is what one evidenceinvestor.co.uk had to say about the 2016 year results...


http://www.evidenceinvestor.co.uk/2016-uk-fund-managers-annus-horribilis/

If you are going to read one link from my post, make it the last one. The evidence is clear. 5 likes to your poor response is laughable also, literally shows why the hedge funds are still lapping up people's hard earned money only to underperform the markets.

Just goes to show that you have to choose very carefully. Clearly most people don't.

bostonerimus

MonroeM wrote: »

IMO you have to do your own research. A good point about past performance, as a guide, because VLS funds have only been around the a limited period in investments terms of about 5 years whereas for example you can track most active funds back over a 10 year period. Also, we don't know if VLS will outperform its competitors like L&G Multi Index or HSBC Global Strategy funds over a longer period - only time will tell?

The bold is mine......I wish we could get away from terms like "out perform". Chasing return is usually a path to failure or at best frustration. Once the investor realizes that the vast majority of market pundits and active managers deal in numerology they will live a far happier investing life. The best of the bad alternatives to predicting the future is to buy the markets and put your fate in the hands of the averages and the standard deviations.

The performance of two index trackers should be the same as should be the performance of two multi-asset trackers with a similar asset mix....so choose your asset allocation, keep fees low and the funds diverse and stop worrying about performance.

Redski69

MarcoM wrote: »

has anyone started their transfer from HL yet?
I am wondering what approach HL will take on this. Do you guys think they will reduce their fees within a matter of weeks or not?


I would like to move to vanguard but I am concerned about the possible level of customer service I may encounter.


Like other posters on here, a few months ago I emailed them to
ask if they offered ISAs and it took them 4 weeks to reply to my mail...

If HL reduce their fees I'll eat my keyboard.

StellaN

Does anybody know if there has been any reaction/comments to the new Vanguard platform from any of the other platforms? Or do they think its best to ignore it and things will settle down?

koru

Redski69 wrote: »

If HL reduce their fees I'll eat my keyboard.

:rotfl:
Yes, I'd be surprised if Vanguard could make a big enough dent in their customer base. Most customers must still be largely invested in active funds, even though HL have stopped preaching that passives are the devil's work (coincidentally just at the time when trail commission was banned).