Outlook

Tough times for everyone but looks like it is beginning to get particularly challenging for those overcharging, under performing funds. It was always bound to come, but given the recession investors are talking with their feet and the incumbents are beginning to find life difficult. Two recent stories only go […]

 Following on from a previous post about useful tools for investors we continue to be approached about new offerings asking us to promote them to our community. We have no association with any of these organizations but thought we might highlight a few more to follow up on directly if […]

The Financial Times ran an interesting piece this weekend about Investors worldwide pulling almost $100bn out of equity funds in the first three months of this year – a record shift, and part of a long term trend away from the US market. The article goes on: The outflows also […]

The current edition of The Economist has a special report on asset management.  The first article, by Philip Coggan, The Economist’s Capital Markets Editor, highlights how the fund management industry has and continued to do very well, but for itself.  Here’s a quote from the introductory paragraph: Imagine a business […]

Here at Covestor we are frequently being approached by companies who have valuable offerings for self-directed investors. As such we thought we would start a series of blog posts highlighting these. We are not able to partner with all of these organizations and so hopefully these posts are of value […]

We received an E*Trade marketing email on friday advertising a new fund.  The subject line sounded sensible: "how to survive an up-down market". But looking closer, there was no great insight. The conlcusion was to diversify. Less likely to help you to survive the market, than to better correlate to […]

An interesting round-table discussion was posted on 12.10 in Pensions and Investments (The Journal of International Money Management) about the changing face of value of investment management firms. It highlights how despite the credit crunch, there is continued client demand for alternative investments (i.e. hedge funds) which is driving both […]

We recently met with Journalist Robin Raskin, whose daughter has been working on a project that we thought might be of interest to our members. We don’t recommend, or have a view on your investments at Covestor, but this seemed worthy of highlight.  MicroPlace allows you to lend money to […]

The London Times this weekend highlighted a great report by Bestinvest, the Indepedent Financial Advisor, on the huge growth in the amount of money sitting in underperforming funds: "The number of poor-performing, or “dog”, investment funds has nearly doubled in the past 18 months, according to a new study. Bestinvest, […]

There was an excellent post yesterday in the Wall Street Journal Online on How the Rich Invest. The summary was:  the rich don’t invest in ETFs and Mutual Funds – but allocate more to actively managed opportunities like Hedge funds that are out of the reach of the less rich.  […]

We are going to post this directly from the full article because it is such a great piece about Financial advisors fees. "Brokers, Financial Advisors, & Investing for the Wealthy The traditional broker-client relationship is crippled by a fundamental conflict of interest: the broker is not directly compensated for giving […]

We have spent a good part of the day trying to find information about Fund Managers to create accounts for them on Covestor to let members compare their own performance to. What is surprising is how little information is available relating to these individuals. Searching through the 100 largest funds […]