UK based funds - brexit and onwards

LHW99

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

I missed that, looked several times too. They regularly have headline Brexit horror stories high up on on the main page, such as recently one person paying more for a coat, positive comments from Nissan should have been on the main page too. The pre Brexit warnings from Nissan were. 

I'd argue neither story should have made the front page. It basically boils down to "Nissan windbag issues scary warning then changes his mind".

There were very real concerns that a hard deal would have devastated the UK car industry which is a significant part of the UK economy. Reporting that was right. 

The actual comment was: "You know we are the number one carmaker in the UK and we want to continue. We are committed. Having said that, if we are not getting the current tariffs, it's not our intention but the business will not be sustainable. That's what everybody has to understand."

It was made in June last year. It's right that those comments should have been reported. It is likely that if there was no deal and a reversion to WTO rules, it would have been pretty bad for the car industry.

But there was a follow-up story in mid-November with further comments from the Nissan COO saying effectively if a deal was not reached next week (end of November), then it would be too late to save the industry. That simply was not true and should not have been given such credibility.

Seems reasonable to report it to me, even if the exact date was wrong. They were saying it had  to be agreed then. They and other news sites reported countless warnings from business leaders, car making was especially vulnerable due to moving so many parts to and from other EU countries.

If you spin it like that, i.e. that the exact date was wrong, but the thing the warning was contingent on didn't happen, then the news that something didn't happen, therefore something dependent on that thing also didn't happen, is considerably less newsworthy. In the end though, I think all of that is irrelevant, because what keeps things on the front page is engagement from visitors.

Then we disagree. Regarding the last remark, they don’t get on the front page by engagement but by editorial decisions. Alastair Campbell understood well how the media works, and how to use them to manipulate public opinion. It isn’t just ‘report the news’. 

It seems like people of all political persuasions accuse the BBC of bias against their political viewpoint, so perhaps it is striking a better balance than people give it credit for. The main bone I've had to pick with its reporting is its poor handling of statistics, for example making headlines with large-looking relative numbers, while ignoring absolute numbers, which may be infinitesimal (fictitious example: odds of being hit by extinction level asteroid in 2021 up 25% on year 2020, absolute risk <0.000001%).

I don’t buy that first part although it is often said by the BBC. They do attack any government, but it’s the general reporting and content that is slanted. It is well established that BBC executives are as a group on the left with regards to their voting tendencies. The newspapers delivered to executives are dominated by the Guardian. I have never heard people compain that the agenda and tone is right wing.

The left would point at Laura Kuenssberg, who they paint as the Government's propagandist in chief. If you've ever watched Channel 4 news, you'd see how weak the BBC is when holding the Government to account. I do see the slanted reporting that you mention, but different articles are slanted in different ways. If you gather your news from a range of different sources as anyone should, then you get to see the whole spectrum of slants placed on a single piece of news, and the BBC's slant tends to sit near the middle in my experience.

Not in my view. The reporting of Brexit and Black Lives Matters was hugely unbalanced, for example. I don’t watch TV, but there has been a lot of criticism of C4 claiming it is biased to the left, I’ve seen none saying it is biased to the right. This article claims that some C4 journalists formally complained about the bias:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1214627/channel-four-left-wing-bias-against-tories-boris-johnson-bbc-labour-jeremy-corbyn

They also claim that a senior BBC journalist said the C4 news has been taken over by a ‘sanctimonious” left wing cabal. 

I don't watch TV either, but if you believe what you read in the Daily Express then I can understand why we might disagree on things. There's biased news, and then there's news that's so detached from reality you might as well be living in a parallel universe.

There’s plenty of sources saying that C4 news is quite left wing, none saying otherwise. Now of course you might think the Express is making up the story, but I suppose anyone on the right says the same about the Guardian, because it doesn’t fit their agenda. The story says that representations were made by C4 journalists to senior ITN staff, so if it was untrue, they could complain to various bodies and force a retraction. It doesn’t look like they did. 

Yes, other right wing news sources regard C4 news as biased because they attack the Government, when that Government is Conservative. What they forget is C4 news also attacked the Labour Government when it was in power. I think it is reasonable to suggest that they are broadly liberal, which of course goes back to the 'slants' discussion, but they do have a tendency to hold the Government of the day to account whatever party is in power, unlike the BBC.

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

masonic said:

BananaRepublic said:

I missed that, looked several times too. They regularly have headline Brexit horror stories high up on on the main page, such as recently one person paying more for a coat, positive comments from Nissan should have been on the main page too. The pre Brexit warnings from Nissan were. 

I'd argue neither story should have made the front page. It basically boils down to "Nissan windbag issues scary warning then changes his mind".

There were very real concerns that a hard deal would have devastated the UK car industry which is a significant part of the UK economy. Reporting that was right. 

The actual comment was: "You know we are the number one carmaker in the UK and we want to continue. We are committed. Having said that, if we are not getting the current tariffs, it's not our intention but the business will not be sustainable. That's what everybody has to understand."

It was made in June last year. It's right that those comments should have been reported. It is likely that if there was no deal and a reversion to WTO rules, it would have been pretty bad for the car industry.

But there was a follow-up story in mid-November with further comments from the Nissan COO saying effectively if a deal was not reached next week (end of November), then it would be too late to save the industry. That simply was not true and should not have been given such credibility.

Seems reasonable to report it to me, even if the exact date was wrong. They were saying it had  to be agreed then. They and other news sites reported countless warnings from business leaders, car making was especially vulnerable due to moving so many parts to and from other EU countries.

If you spin it like that, i.e. that the exact date was wrong, but the thing the warning was contingent on didn't happen, then the news that something didn't happen, therefore something dependent on that thing also didn't happen, is considerably less newsworthy. In the end though, I think all of that is irrelevant, because what keeps things on the front page is engagement from visitors.

Then we disagree. Regarding the last remark, they don’t get on the front page by engagement but by editorial decisions. Alastair Campbell understood well how the media works, and how to use them to manipulate public opinion. It isn’t just ‘report the news’. 

It seems like people of all political persuasions accuse the BBC of bias against their political viewpoint, so perhaps it is striking a better balance than people give it credit for. The main bone I've had to pick with its reporting is its poor handling of statistics, for example making headlines with large-looking relative numbers, while ignoring absolute numbers, which may be infinitesimal (fictitious example: odds of being hit by extinction level asteroid in 2021 up 25% on year 2020, absolute risk <0.000001%).

I don’t buy that first part although it is often said by the BBC. They do attack any government, but it’s the general reporting and content that is slanted. It is well established that BBC executives are as a group on the left with regards to their voting tendencies. The newspapers delivered to executives are dominated by the Guardian. I have never heard people compain that the agenda and tone is right wing.

The left would point at Laura Kuenssberg, who they paint as the Government's propagandist in chief. If you've ever watched Channel 4 news, you'd see how weak the BBC is when holding the Government to account. I do see the slanted reporting that you mention, but different articles are slanted in different ways. If you gather your news from a range of different sources as anyone should, then you get to see the whole spectrum of slants placed on a single piece of news, and the BBC's slant tends to sit near the middle in my experience.

Not in my view. The reporting of Brexit and Black Lives Matters was hugely unbalanced, for example. I don’t watch TV, but there has been a lot of criticism of C4 claiming it is biased to the left, I’ve seen none saying it is biased to the right. This article claims that some C4 journalists formally complained about the bias:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1214627/channel-four-left-wing-bias-against-tories-boris-johnson-bbc-labour-jeremy-corbyn

They also claim that a senior BBC journalist said the C4 news has been taken over by a ‘sanctimonious” left wing cabal. 

I don't watch TV either, but if you believe what you read in the Daily Express then I can understand why we might disagree on things. There's biased news, and then there's news that's so detached from reality you might as well be living in a parallel universe.

There’s plenty of sources saying that C4 news is quite left wing, none saying otherwise. Now of course you might think the Express is making up the story, but I suppose anyone on the right says the same about the Guardian, because it doesn’t fit their agenda. The story says that representations were made by C4 journalists to senior ITN staff, so if it was untrue, they could complain to various bodies and force a retraction. It doesn’t look like they did. 

Yes, other right wing news sources regard C4 news as biased because they attack the Government, when that Government is Conservative. What they forget is C4 news also attacked the Labour Government when it was in power. I think it is reasonable to suggest that they are broadly liberal, which of course goes back to the 'slants' discussion, but they do have a tendency to hold the Government of the day to account whatever party is in power, unlike the BBC.

The main thing I take issue with is that too many journalists think "challenging" politicians means constantly interrupting them and / or providing their own commentry on the politicians words - rather than letting people hear the points made, exploring / questioning the points after they have been made and letting people make up their own minds about the issue.

kinger101

Prism said:

Another_Saver said:

 If you look at any long term period out to 1990 that includes the last 5 years, the UK has done crap even though until the last 5 years, the UK and global market were more or less behaving the same way (comparing large Cap or total market indices on a nominal total return basis in £, just use the indices or sectors on trustnet or compare Barclays UK equity index with S&P 500 total returns data which is widely available) and have performed similarly over the very long term.
Some see this as an indicator of a new norm, others like me see this as a buying opportunity.

I am more and more thinking that it is a technology revolution that we are sitting out, at least as far as the companies leading it. I can see the UK stocks doing reasonably well going forward but I'm not sure we will make up the ground already lost. I don't think there is a return to mean coming along.

Reversion to the mean is a statistically phenomenon which is often used incorrectly in finance.  
Simply put, the further a random sample is from the population mean, the higher probability the next sample drawn will deviate less.  This does not mean we're more likely to observe above average performance to make up for lost ground.  Assuming a normal distribution, a random sample will always have as much chance of being above the mean as below.

BuildTheWall

Another_Saver said:

Why do you think the FTSE 100 is a poor index to invest in, and relative to what? Granted this thread isn't a home/global bias debate or a UK weighting discussion, but I hear it so often, declared as if it's an established fact.

Many have answered this, but I thought I’ll just add my 2p. 

It’s not just FTSE100, a lot of output in UK is not captured through companies listed here. Think about the investment banks who employ tens of thousands of people in the City - most of the staff are employed by American banks, so their output and profits don’t get reported here (as in UK equity). Entertainment- Sky is not listed here. Tech - Google and Apple employ thousands of people here, but their stocks are not listed here. Your spending on Amazon, Netflix, cars, computers, mobiles - not captured through UK listed equities. Services are performed locally, but difficult to get exposure to them. Which is why I’d recommend to invest in global funds, active or passive. If you really want to get some specific exposure to UK economy, UK small caps can be the closest proxy for investing. But remember that with more automation, these companies will be competing with giants and foreign companies too. 

masonic

Would this be a bad time to suggest use of the FTSE 250 as a better proxy for the UK economy?

Moe_The_Bartender

BuildTheWall said:

Another_Saver said:

Why do you think the FTSE 100 is a poor index to invest in, and relative to what? Granted this thread isn't a home/global bias debate or a UK weighting discussion, but I hear it so often, declared as if it's an established fact.

Many have answered this, but I thought I’ll just add my 2p. 

It’s not just FTSE100, a lot of output in UK is not captured through companies listed here. Think about the investment banks who employ tens of thousands of people in the City - most of the staff are employed by American banks, so their output and profits don’t get reported here (as in UK equity). Entertainment- Sky is not listed here. Tech - Google and Apple employ thousands of people here, but their stocks are not listed here. Your spending on Amazon, Netflix, cars, computers, mobiles - not captured through UK listed equities. Services are performed locally, but difficult to get exposure to them. Which is why I’d recommend to invest in global funds, active or passive. If you really want to get some specific exposure to UK economy, UK small caps can be the closest proxy for investing. But remember that with more automation, these companies will be competing with giants and foreign companies too. 

Then there are the private companies that make up a huge chunk of GDP.

BuildTheWall

kinger101 said:

Prism said:

Another_Saver said:

 If you look at any long term period out to 1990 that includes the last 5 years, the UK has done crap even though until the last 5 years, the UK and global market were more or less behaving the same way (comparing large Cap or total market indices on a nominal total return basis in £, just use the indices or sectors on trustnet or compare Barclays UK equity index with S&P 500 total returns data which is widely available) and have performed similarly over the very long term.
Some see this as an indicator of a new norm, others like me see this as a buying opportunity.

I am more and more thinking that it is a technology revolution that we are sitting out, at least as far as the companies leading it. I can see the UK stocks doing reasonably well going forward but I'm not sure we will make up the ground already lost. I don't think there is a return to mean coming along.

Reversion to the mean is a statistically phenomenon which is often used incorrectly in finance.  
Simply put, the further a random sample is from the population mean, the higher probability the next sample drawn will deviate less.  This does not mean we're more likely to observe above average performance to make up for lost ground.  Assuming a normal distribution, a random sample will always have as much chance of being above the mean as below.

I find it fascinating that so many people use mean reversion as their basis for investing. It’s like they have noticed one sector does well in a decade and gives way to another in a smooth transition  like a relay race. I don’t know if they use it to console themselves having missed the tech rally. 

Two problems with that - (1) the sectors might come back into fashion, but rarely with the same stocks. Half the stocks in Dow Jones now weren’t listed in that index 20 years ago. Some of those old stocks don’t even exist anymore. (2) How accurate are the sector definitions? Is Tesla really a tech company? If VW sells more cars next year, would you say auto sector did well while tech didn’t? Is Netflix a tech company? If Disney and Discovery do well in streaming next year, would you say media sector is growing faster than tech? 

Moe_The_Bartender

theothersaver said:

BuildTheWall said:

Another_Saver said:

Why do you think the FTSE 100 is a poor index to invest in, and relative to what? Granted this thread isn't a home/global bias debate or a UK weighting discussion, but I hear it so often, declared as if it's an established fact.

Many have answered this, but I thought I’ll just add my 2p. 

It’s not just FTSE100, a lot of output in UK is not captured through companies listed here. Think about the investment banks who employ tens of thousands of people in the City - most of the staff are employed by American banks, so their output and profits don’t get reported here (as in UK equity). Entertainment- Sky is not listed here. Tech - Google and Apple employ thousands of people here, but their stocks are not listed here. Your spending on Amazon, Netflix, cars, computers, mobiles - not captured through UK listed equities. Services are performed locally, but difficult to get exposure to them. Which is why I’d recommend to invest in global funds, active or passive. If you really want to get some specific exposure to UK economy, UK small caps can be the closest proxy for investing. But remember that with more automation, these companies will be competing with giants and foreign companies too. 

Covered in my post above and in my thread "The FTSE 100 is (not) crap, here's why"

masonic said:

Would this be a bad time to suggest use of the FTSE 250 as a better proxy for the UK economy?

Also covered (and I broadly agree).

Moe_The_Bartender said:

BuildTheWall said:

Another_Saver said:

Why do you think the FTSE 100 is a poor index to invest in, and relative to what? Granted this thread isn't a home/global bias debate or a UK weighting discussion, but I hear it so often, declared as if it's an established fact.

Many have answered this, but I thought I’ll just add my 2p. 

It’s not just FTSE100, a lot of output in UK is not captured through companies listed here. Think about the investment banks who employ tens of thousands of people in the City - most of the staff are employed by American banks, so their output and profits don’t get reported here (as in UK equity). Entertainment- Sky is not listed here. Tech - Google and Apple employ thousands of people here, but their stocks are not listed here. Your spending on Amazon, Netflix, cars, computers, mobiles - not captured through UK listed equities. Services are performed locally, but difficult to get exposure to them. Which is why I’d recommend to invest in global funds, active or passive. If you really want to get some specific exposure to UK economy, UK small caps can be the closest proxy for investing. But remember that with more automation, these companies will be competing with giants and foreign companies too. 

Then there are the private companies that make up a huge chunk of GDP.

In spite of which the FTSE 100 has still grown at almost exactly the same rate as GDP since inception, as I covered.

I've no idea why you see any correlation between the FTSE100 and GDP. In terms of GDP per capita, the UK has barely moved in 12 years. That is has increased at all is simply due to increased population, many of them in low wage jobs.

BananaRepublic

BuildTheWall said:

Another_Saver said:

Why do you think the FTSE 100 is a poor index to invest in, and relative to what? Granted this thread isn't a home/global bias debate or a UK weighting discussion, but I hear it so often, declared as if it's an established fact.

Many have answered this, but I thought I’ll just add my 2p. 

It’s not just FTSE100, a lot of output in UK is not captured through companies listed here. Think about the investment banks who employ tens of thousands of people in the City - most of the staff are employed by American banks, so their output and profits don’t get reported here (as in UK equity). Entertainment- Sky is not listed here. Tech - Google and Apple employ thousands of people here, but their stocks are not listed here. Your spending on Amazon, Netflix, cars, computers, mobiles - not captured through UK listed equities. Services are performed locally, but difficult to get exposure to them. Which is why I’d recommend to invest in global funds, active or passive. If you really want to get some specific exposure to UK economy, UK small caps can be the closest proxy for investing. But remember that with more automation, these companies will be competing with giants and foreign companies too. 

I’ve worked for many small UK companies that were sold on to big companies, all but one were American, the other was French and the largest company in its sector in the world. There seems to be a desire in the UK for company owners to sell and trouser a mint. This might be connected with the status of engineers here. Salaries in the UK for engineers are low compared to the US and Germany, all too often small UK businesses seem to want engineers to accept a low salary, while they aim to get rich. The US tech giants issued shares to staff as an incentive, that is quite rare here in my experience. 

Moe_The_Bartender

I really can’t be bothered to look at your spreadsheet and if you don’t understand the meaning of correlation, you need Google or a dictionary. And if you think you were being mocked, you might look up the meaning of paranoia at the same time.

theothersaver

Moe_The_Bartender said:

I really can’t be bothered to look at your spreadsheet and if you don’t understand the meaning of correlation, you need Google or a dictionary. And if you think you were being mocked, you might look up the meaning of paranoia at the same time.

You conflated "GDP and the FTSE 100 have grown at the rate" with "GDP and the FTSE 100 are correlated". I said the former, 1985-2019 (we don't have 2020's full year GDP figure yet) both grew at 5.05%.
I have a Maths degree and am a finance professional, thanks.

Besides which, I have shown that as far back as ONS GDP data goes to 1948, it and the UK stock market ARE strongly correlated, Pearson correlation coefficients of 97.7% in nominal terms, 84.5% in real terms.

If you have alternative facts, present them.