Market analysis that cuts through the noise

Recent research from asset manager abrdn shows that just under half of the UK population has ‘poor’ financial literacy. As the Financial Times reported, the research contains some illuminating, if not downright worrying, stats:.

It’s no wonder the old-fashioned savings scheme has gone the way of the dodo. Apart from the fact most of them offered a decidedly analogue customer experience with paper forms, passport sized photographs, scissors and glue, the way they were paid for wasn’t exactly fair: most of the costs were borne by the Trusts participating in the fund manager’s scheme.

The subject for this Year’s AIC Directors’ Conference was regulatory change. As Peter Spiller (Co-Manager of Capital Gearing Trust) pointed out on a recent edition of the Money Makers podcast ‘governments and regulators have conspired against investment trusts in particular’.

For 13 years Henderson Smaller Companies has almost continually traded at a discount – where the share price is lower than the value of the assets in the portfolio. And so has much of the rest of the UK smaller companies sector, for most of that time.

An investment trust board meeting covering marketing or secondary market liquidity can prompt complex questions as to objectives, measurement and what success is meant to look like. Having worked on over 200 boards on such KPIs, we recognise that every board can see their template often differently and many results reported are activity-related in isolation.

Evolution: telling your “value add” story – developing your trust's message house. Everyone now is online and able to compare the messaging and delivery tools of others. It is not possible nor effective to try to segment communication and audience channels easily, once sliced by professional, retail, large and small.

We recently published articles on three key aspects of investment trust marketing: reaching the valuable, but elusive D2C investor; their requirements for access and engagement; and how best to measure and manage marketing performance.

Reaching self-directed investors is not straightforward, nor automatic, yet this group, using direct platforms account, in aggregate, for the majority ownership bloc in investment trusts.

Accelerated by COVID, half-empty offices and remote home working, having a digital persona for investment trusts is becoming the primary means to enquire and discovery. It is also a high maintenance activity, with stories and images conveyed through animations, webinars, podcasts and advertorial which ideally should feel seamless to what is the user’s own experience.

Retail shareholders, known in marketing jargon as the Direct to Consumer (D2C) segment, are growing in number as a result of pension deregulation, the simplicity and tax advantages of ISAs and SIPPs  and the growth of easy to navigate platforms.

2020 saw unprecedented numbers of clients signing up to investment platforms. Many brokers enjoyed trading levels two or three times higher than pre-pandemic norms. With "Lockdown 3” now in place, at a minimum for the next six weeks and potentially until the end of Q1, could this trend continue with a new wave of investors researching and buying investments online?.

Sophisticated retail investors are emerging as the driving force behind a resurgence in demand for investment trusts, according to a comprehensive new independent analysis of fund flows and ownership patterns in the investment trust sector.

com/warhorse-partners/may-2020-the-future-of-the-global-investment-industry-after-lock-down. Professor Amin Rajan, CEO of UK think tank CREATE-Research, a guest blogger of ours, shares his startling insights.

Piers Currie appeared on a lively radio podcast on Monday, interviewed by Chuck Jaffe from Money Life from Boston about the US closed-end fund industry and sharing thoughts about UK best practice.

Guest blog from Asia, Patrick Corfe. Another week passes and Hong Kong citizens rally against the erosion of rights under the Basic Law. In theory the UK has a duty to ensure their rights are upheld.

Guest blog by Rupert Hodson, Co-founder and CEO, Dianomi. Digital marketing is now well into its adolescence, having disrupted traditional media, advertising and publisher models, but its next stage of evolution will surely be advertisers and clients becoming ever more sensitive to context and real value of what they say and do online.

Piers Currie, Warhorse Partners. The conundrum facing boards relates principally to constituency; the defection of institutional investors, once reliable anchor tenants on share registers, has left a hole.

Digital can sometimes protest its virtues too much. I’ve found corporate e-Christmas cards from offices can grate, especially when accompanied with a virtue line about saving forests.

Mark Colegate of Asset TV interviewed me last week why self-directed investors should be interested in their fellow shareholders in investment trusts. Ownership structures are often concerns for large scale institutional investors, but as self-directed investors grow in terms of scale and influence, aspects of understanding fellow travellers may are worth understanding, as it can add volatility through corporate actions and surprises.

As lock down rumbled on, it was so nice last month to be asked to write a series of blogs or articles for Citywire Wealth magazine, sort of in the style of "a sideways look at the investment sector".

I am one of nineteen judges at the annual mutual fund industry awards 2020 in the USA. This annual Fund Intelligence event, led by the eponymous publisher Pageant Media, normally involves a big banquet ceremony in New York City, where the winners are celebrated, collecting hard-won awards and applauded for their success.

In this podcast we spoke to Hong Kong veteran Stewart Aldcroft of Citi about prospects in light of Covid 19 and Beijing’s recent security crackdown. Despite this baleful background, he says the Hong Kong funds' industry continues to serve everyone’s interests — and is in competitive good health.

A feral urban urban fox (c) The Telegraph. Piers Currie, 14 April 2020. When I was young, there was a story of albino alligators in New York City that apparently crawled up the sewage system and surprised visitors in bathrooms.

In this second episode of a podcast interview with Martin Gilbert, former vice-chair SLA plc and co-founder of Aberdeen Asset Management, Martin shares his wider reflections on the early business, company culture and the value of experience.

Future of asset management now – Episode 1: “five years of change in ten weeks". com/warhorse-partners/future-of-asset-management-now-part-1-five-years-of-change-in-ten-weeks. Please click on the above link to listen to the podcast.

On a Sunday evening, this vimeo that arrived earlier of the choirs of Eton College remotely singing "I was Glad" by Sir Hubert Parry I found deeply moving,. I think it is the wonderful talented children's voices, singing now as a choir but distanced at homes, yet somehow together, the organist playing alone in chapel but there, then orchestration, all creating something together so integral and unifying a sense of collective identity - and then belting out what everything might worth holding together for everyone in UK lock-down.

" It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom, for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. " The Declaration of Arbroath (1320).

This is Major Tom to Ground Control

My yellow FIAT 500 and I have dreaded today. Weepy Alex, the Bulgarian assistant to my medical consultant, Mr Poppet, said last week I indeed need the necessary blood test , at the London Hospital in perso n, today Monday, to allow the good doctor to advise the result tomorrow, remotely.

Apparently flights to Lisbon are starting again next week, according to the man in the Myddleton deli kitchen. “How does social distancing work in a plane?” I asked. “It doesn’t,” he answered.

As you will know from the back of my WFH media directory, I follow various organisations I rate when I wrote a cheat booklet called “our global themes in asset management” some years back at Aberdeen Asset Management.

Remoteness is in the mind  The concepts of isolation and the vocabulary of distance are based on a world of physical distance and the removal of normal time. This is why many conversations, emails, video calls are so somewhat bewildering right now.

Congratulations to Piers Currie, winner of the Investment Week award for "Outstanding Industry Contribution". Onwards we gallop!.