LDI nuts and bolts It’s hard to have escaped all the recent noise in the media about the UK’s mini budget (ironically with not-so-mini consequences!) and the repercussions through financial markets. And one of those headline consequences was pension funds being plunged into liquidity crunches due totheir LDI strategies. Again, ironically, the funds hit
We have been involved with raising money for Snow-Camp for 5 years now and it’s a chance to give back to the community, raise funds and have fun. This year was no exception as one of our Directors, Mark Woolhouse headed to beautiful Courmayeur, Italy for his biggest alpine challenge to date! Snow-Camp are a
I have been managing my own money for over 15 years: in 2000, I gave up the safety of a bank salary and non-contributory pension to lead a management buyout. I found myself with a couple of legacy final salary entitlements and a small pension pot in “Zombie” fund manager, Phoenix Group. My pension manager
Last time I blogged I talked about my top down approach to asset allocation and how I used the Salty Dog data www.saltydoginvestor.com. What should your investment horizon be? The Salty approach seems to promote churning. Buy when performing, sell when not, then reinvest. I would like to emphasise that I don’t “actively trade”, I
Claim it back through training! It has been over two years since the UK government announced it would introduce the Apprenticeship Levy, and as of April 2017 it has now come into effect. If you are a business with a wage bill of over £3m per annum (including bonuses and pension contributions), then you will
Blockchain is the big buzzword in financial services at the moment. You may have been to a number of blockchain conferences, forums and seminars where you've found yourself surrounded by slightly bemused bankers, lawyers and other professionals who are all excited to be part of this next great innovation in FinTech. But it seems few,
In my previous blog, I walked through my portfolio history to give a feel for how I decide my allocations. I hope also that you will get out of this is a feeling for my cognitive biases and people’s generally. I have a number of observations to make about good and bad habits, some learnt
Keeping up with advances in technology can sometimes feel a daunting task. The speed with which the digital world has evolved in the past 20 years alone is staggering. Technology has become integral to our lives in so many ways and new advances are something that as a society we are asked to readily embrace
Once again there are rumblings and warnings of a fresh financial crisis along the lines of 2008. Banks are supposedly better regulated now, and have generally lower corporate lending levels. Potential banking fallout should therefore be less dramatic than that witnessed in the period following 2008. However, this will not stop a number of banks
One thing that FCA is good at is trailing its views. So it is that the Asset Management Market Study Final Report contains no real surprises. But lack of surprise does not mean lack of impact. These measures will certainly have that, especially on the pockets of fund managers. And not so much as a
