True Potential Wealth Management. Anyone had dealings with them? Good or Bad !

dunstonh

Diplodicus said:

Interesting. If a pension transfer is “phased in” to a fund, is the ongoing adviser fee payable as a % of the whole, dunstonh? 

The ongoing fee is charged against the wrapper.    The contents of the wrappers are irrelevant.  So, whether it is 100% cash, or 100% equities or whatever, it is all inside the wrapper.    

Diplodicus

When would an adviser make a positive recommendation, then advise the client to “phase in” his or her pension transfer?

Seems at odds with the True Potential proposition. The well trodden path from DB pension to TP Portfolio looks to have a number of clear steps: understand a client’s goals and risk-profile, match it with one of their portfolios and (if a transfer is deemed suitable) invest. Once the transfer is securely in its portfolio, it looks like TP make all investment decisions. 

bowlhead99

Diplodicus said:

When would an adviser make a positive recommendation, then advise the client to “phase in” his or her pension transfer?

Seems at odds with the True Potential proposition. The well trodden path from DB pension to TP Portfolio looks to.... 

Who is saying the adviser would say that is the best thing to do? Who is even saying the OP is looking to transfer a DB pension?

DavidT67

Just avoid any firm with "Wealth Manager" in their name!  They will be the only ones getting wealthy; off their fees.

Diplodicus

“Avoid anything with Wealth Management in the name”  -David.  TP are” Beyond Wealth Management”!!

”Just cannot find anyone to compare them to” - Danboy.  Vanguard Life Strategy are popular with many of us on MSE forums. There is a link upthread to the performance of TP Portfolios, whose five main funds would seem to correspond with VL 20-40-60-80-100 in risk profile, if not gains.  ( remember the usual disclaimers about past performance etc)

”Who says an adviser would say that phasing-in a pension transfer is the best thing to do” - 
bowlhead. Not me, and certainly not for a TP pension transfer; but then I’m not an adviser and I did not introduce the idea of phasing-in to this thread.

”Who even says that the OP has a DB pension”
- Nobody. But a lot of DB pensions have been transferred to TP. Why is that relevant to a thread about TP? Because their assets under management have increased significantly even as the underlying funds have languished. 

Diplodicus

Incidentally, Danboy: 
IFA advising a move to a TP personal pension here:  www.forums.moneysavingexpert.com/6060679/financial-advisors-true-potential/p2

£600k sum - unclear whether it is to be phased in.

bowlhead99

Diplodicus said:

”Who says an adviser would say that phasing-in a pension transfer is the best thing to do” - 
bowlhead. 

Not me, and certainly not for a TP pension transfer; but then I’m not an adviser and I did not introduce the idea of phasing-in to this thread.

You commented that if someone had invested their money with TP in the first year for which the trailing portfolio returns were published (May16-May17) the investor would have done well, but that in more recent financial periods (e.g. May 18-May19, or May19-May20) the returns were much lower.

That is simply because investments across various markets generally performed better in the first period than in the more recent periods. If you invested more of your money in the more recent periods ('phasing in' your investment) so that the weighted average amount of money in the investment was higher in the years when portfolio performance was lower (economy going into the toilet during the year May19-May20 for example) you would have got a worse result with TP (or with Vanguard Lifestrategy) than if you had invested it all as a lump sum back in May 2016.

That is a function of the 'phasing in' or timing your investment. So, by making someone explain why investors who invested later would get lower returns (because they have phased their investment to only have a small amount deployed when markets are going gangbusters and a larger amount deployed when markets are benign or negative), you really introduced that concept yourself.

You explained it as "as True Potential has rapidly expanded its client base, the gains have dwindled to nothing", implying that the low performance of a TP 'Balanced+' investment from May19-20 of 1.1% (while Vanguard LS60 with its higher US index allocation gave 5.2%)  versus its greater performance May16-May17 of 18.6% (VLS60: 19.7%) was not simply to do with markets performing generally lower, but instead something to do with them rapidly expanding their client base.

It seems to me that it is not a case of 'they added more clients so performance fell'. That wouldn't be a reasonable explanation for performance of a model portfolio to fall, because model portfolios' performance are not generally a function of how many people use them, as Dunstonh had explained in response to your comment. He said that instead, the returns would depend on how the underlying financial markets performed.

You said that most of the growth happened before most of the client money was on board and that potential clients should consider that. But as Dunstonh pointed out, the fact that more money came in later is not really a key thing to consider when deciding if they are a good provider or not.

Phasing your investment so less money is in the markets in higher performing periods and more money comes in later during less-impressive periods, is something to be aware of if you were considering drip-feeding any investment. If your money is not there to catch both the good times and the bad, you may be worse off - and statistically, phasing investment reduces returns.

The reason that many TP investors will have got less than the total returns that have been on offer from TP portfolios, is because they didn't choose to invest earlier when markets were performing better. Likewise if they didn't invest in Vanguard LS60 in 2016-17 when it was giving 19% return and only invested later, e.g. in 2018-19 when it delivered 3%, that is simply an issue of market timing ; drip feeding versus lump sum; phasing versus one-off immediate investment as early as possible. 

It is not because the returns from Vanguard portfolios are 'dwindling way' as assets under management grow. It is a function of the fact that markets have up years and down years and nothing years and if you are only around for some of them you will only get the returns from some of them, whoever's product you use.

You then seem to have got the wrong end of the stick about why someone was talking about 'phasing' and so you were asking questions about whether an adviser would charge for advising on undeployed cash, why would they recommend to hold money back in cash after doing a transfer, isn't that a departure from what TP usually do etc etc. You've simply missed the point. Phasing was only mentioned in the first place as part of correcting you about why investors investing in May19-20 got a low return and investors who were on board in May16-17 got many multiples of that.

In other words you felt that it was a function of them taking on too many clients allowing returns to dwindle, when really it is that global financial markets happened to perform better in the earlier years and a TP or Vanguard investor deploying all their money back then would have done better than that same investor only coming on board to either product a year ago.

Diplodicus

Bowlhead - Your post is so very long that I should just address the last para. 
What you imagined I was feeling was not what I was feeling.
What I feel is that the concept of “phasing in” a TP pension is s bogus concept; a “red herring.” 

bowlhead99

Diplodicus said:

What you imagined I was feeling was not what I was feeling.
What I feel is that the concept of “phasing in” a TP pension is s bogus concept; a “red herring.” 

So the idea that the returns experienced by investors who only invested in TP or Vanguard et al in the last couple of years is lower than the returns of those investors who had invested a lump of cash into TP or Vanguard in 2016, as a consequence of only catching the low-return or flat years within a market cycle rather than investing as early as possible and getting a mix of strongly up years, down years and nothing years, is a red herring?

And the real reason the investors putting their money with Vanguard or TP in the last couple of years got a lower return is not to do with the fact that a blend of major asset classes simply delivered lower returns in 2018/19/20 than in 16/17, but is due to TP rapidly expanding its client base, as a consequence of which, the gains offered by TP have dwindled so that investors joining later may not see a great return.

Ok, if that's what you want to believe.

But seems misguided criticism.

Diplodicus

No bowl-head; having sifted the agonised contortions of your prose ,  both your paragraphs are wrong:

1) It is only legitimate to measure one against another in the same time-frame (for example, a horse race result counts only if all the runners start at the same time).
In this TP are the loser compared to (say) VL.

2) No,  that was never claimed. My claim is that TP garnered a lot of business on the back of gains in Y1   -  which clearly have not been sustained since.