News & updates
News & Updates
Feedback on my British Steel article
I wrote here that the entire basis of the FCA's assessment of the suitability of transfers from a DB or final-salary scheme to personal pension in readiness for drawdown was so flawed on first principles as to make any s404 consumer redress scheme that relied on it...
‘Bargain basement’ UK
'Activist investors descend on 'bargain basement' UK companies', says the FT headline yesterday, quoting one such investor in Los Angeles. As we are quantitative investors, with a rules-based approach driven by our own measure of market valuation, we don't normally...
‘Transitory’ inflation: a weasel word
There is much debate, not least amongst those responsible for monetary policy in different economies, whether the recent global increase in inflation will prove 'transitory'. What exactly do people using that term think it means, or want it to mean to their audience?...
A reasoning error at FOS
In my recent article on the 'false logic' in the FCA's guidance on transfers from DB pension schemes to personal pensions, I alluded to the risk of awards by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) being biased by that logic. Searching FOS published case histories...
Is a British Steel redress scheme workable?
The FCA has bowed to pressure to introduce a Consumer Redress Scheme for all members of British Steel Pension Scheme (BSPS) who were advised to transfer to personal pension alternatives when the company closed the scheme in 2017. Considering there were quite clearly...
Are less liquid investments more productive?
This is not just an academic question. Heads of The Bank of England, HM Treasury and the FCA jointly chaired a working group of the investment industry great and the good which in September 2021 produced a paper, A Roadmap for Increasing Productive Finance Investment,...
The US to UK switch
In this article we give a glimpse of how our modelled probabilities for future real equity returns feed into dynamic asset allocations for the equity component of any Fowler Drew portfolio. This 'look behind the scenes' uses the highly-topical example of the UK and US...
How not to worry about inflation
If your pay, pensions and investment returns were all perfectly indexed to general inflation, would you care much what happened to prices? Imperfect indexation to, or compensation for, inflation is one of the biggest risks individual investors face. How do you improve...
Fowler Drew differs from typical investment firms who seek ‘alpha’ for alpha’s sake, instead harvesting low-cost ‘beta’, building towards target outcomes that clients get to define. Their assumptions about how markets behave seem sensible and plausible to this non-expert client. The focus on outcomes helps us to understand what we are doing and why. It’s self-contained, neat and tidy and very suitable for busy lives.