The S&P 500 had its worst day of trading since April yesterday as good economic data sparked concern that the Federal Reserve may raise interest rates sooner than expected and the FTSE 100 followed suit this morning, falling to 6,680 at the time of writing.
The summer months are usually a quiet time for financial journalists with trading volumes down and a lot of fund managers on holiday, but is good to see that a number of this week’s articles encouraged debate among our readers.
Mark Barnett: How I’ve been re-shaping Invesco Perpetual High Income
FE Alpha Manager Mark Barnett talked to our editor, Josh Ausden, on Monday and explained the changes he had made to the £12.9bn Invesco Perpetual High Income fund since he took it over from Neil Woodford.
He said that his “number one priority” is to make it less reliant on a small pocket of stocks, as the portfolios that he inherited were too concentrated for his liking.
“I’ve never been entirely confident with holdings of more than 6 per cent in one company. I think this is sufficiently big enough to have in a single stock,” Barnett said.
Performance of fund vs sector since Mar 2014
Source: FE Analytics
Though Barnett has had to deal with outflows and reshape the portfolio over recent months, it is still up against the IMA UK All Companies sector since he took over the fund in March.
Five things investors have learnt in 2014
It’s been a very different year this year than it was in 2013.
Though UK and US equities are still at or very close to all-time highs and implied volatility is extremely low, the euphoric optimism that categorised last year’s rally has made way for increasing scepticism among investors.
In this article, we looked at five areas of the market which have performed differently in that changing backdrop, namely smaller companies, gold, emerging markets, bonds and Japan.
The financial crisis is "over": So what should investors be buying? & The financial crisis is "over": So should investors now be selling?
We have grouped these two articles together.
The idea behind the series was to get the thoughts of more bullish industry experts on their outlook for financial assets, following the recent positive GDP figures, and then ask those who were sceptical of the current market in the next article.
In hindsight, we maybe should have put inverted commas in the original slightly ambiguous headline, The financial crises is over: So what should people be buying?, as it sparked a fair amount of abuse from a number of readers.
However, it was good to see that it divided opinion….
Five funds ready to replace annuities
This year’s Budget took the pensions industry by surprise, with a huge number of changes set to be made in the coming years including the decision to not make annuities mandatory.
Ben Willis of Whitechurch Securities says the reforms have caused the “flood-gates to open”, as investment providers will now be looking at possible alternatives to annuities.
With that in mind, we highlighted investors may want to consider as an alternative to annuities in the coming years.
The fund designed to sit alongside Woodford, Frost & Co
In this article, we spoke to Jacob de Tusch-Lec and he explained why he built his Artemis Global Income fund for UK investors who wanted to diversify their income stream away from UK portfolios.
It has been the best performing Global Equity Income fund since its launch and the manager has achieved that with a very low weighting to UK dividend paying stocks.
