I spent an early part of my career working in financial marketing and saw all the shenanigans used by ’the City’ to make its ridiculous salaries. From ’arbitrage’ to ’active fund management’ and definitely in ’investment banking’ it was a joke then and is more laughable now.
Over 30 years, I paid between £300-£400 a month into a pension fund. I received forests of documents meant to protect and inform me during this time. But very little information on what the money men were earning and what return they were delivering, let alone the interest of MPs and government ministers in the funds and company I was/am invested in.
Suffice to say that my pension is worth less than the money paid in after 32 years of being passed around from Refuge to others then Royal London then Scottish Widows (who recently sacked the risible vowel-averse and profit averse abrdn as fund managers in favour of Blackrock.
The same pattern is reflected across my ISAs and in my crypto investments.
Only two things have made me money over the past 38 years – my own companies and property (arguably we’ve done well with art and gold as well).
So you really have to ask what the point of these so called ’professional’ money managers is ? abrdn should clearly have its funds sold or reallocated and be closed down since its fund managers under perform what my cat would do with an inkpad and the FT (and Tigger only requires a can of tuna as payment).
I’m sure that there are good money managers out there but I’m damned if they want to deal with those of us with under £10m.
Money, as they say, begets money and all that’s left for us relatively poor plonkers is buy-to-let and the ravages of inflation.