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Active managers and Monks Investment Trust

The FT’s fund management supplement recently reported that “90% of UK active funds beat the market”. This headline might surprise you because historically it is known that active fund...

Controlling bankers – public consultation in motion

Controlling bankers is a key theme of a public consultation issued jointly by the Bank of England Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The proposals...

Delays in SIPP and ISA transfers

I commented on the delays in transferring a SIPP from Hargreaves Lansdown to another provider in the May ShareSoc Newsletter, and we published some letters from other members on similar problems in the June Newsletter. I thought readers might like to know that the original SIPP transfer has now finally completed. It actually took over 5 calendar months to get all the portfolio holdings to transfer (this being an "in-specie" transfer as it is called). This is clearly a quite ridiculous period ...

National Grid and the Problem of High Pay

I attended the Annual General Meeting of National Grid this week (on the 28th July). It was a typical FTSE-100 company AGM with questions on all kinds of matters, mainly from private shareholders of course. There is a full report on the meeting here, where many other AGM reports are supplied for members. I tackled the issue of high remuneration at this company and the change in the LTIP with a couple of questions, and I expected there to be many more ...

High pound also impacts Renishaw and GlaxoSmithKline

Following on from my blog post a couple of days ago about the high pound impacting the profits of technology companies, yesterday saw final results from Renishaw (RSW) and interims from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) which reflected the same issue. However, the currency impact in both companies was not the main impact on the subsequent share price move. At Renishaw, profits would have been £6.8m higher on top of an "adjusted" figure of £70.1m for the year, but for the currency impact. Last years ...