So without further hesitation, here are our journalists and editors’ favourite stories of the year.
Why FE Trustnet will be battling "one of the biggest travesties" in the fund management industry
This was written by a very angry Alex Paget after an article he planned to write about the actual amount of money paid out by certain funds was thwarted by the lack of information available on their factsheets.
As Paget put it: “Is anyone else slightly baffled by the fact that while you can gain easy access, via a factsheet, to a fund’s total return, its charges, top holdings, manager commentary or even various awards it might have won, you get no insight – apart from a few notable examples – regarding the amount a fund has actually paid out in terms of income over the years?”
Paget decided to use his anger positively and helped launch an FE Trustnet campaign calling for greater transparency around how much money funds have paid to investors. It got off to a great start, with Troy and Allianz agreeing to add a “dividend paid” section to the factsheets of their UK equity income funds.
FE Trustnet income campaign: Why most equity income funds are letting you down
The theme proved as popular with other journalists as it did with our readers – news editor Gary Jackson chose an article written as part of the income transparency campaign as his story of the year.
He found that 80 per cent of IMA UK Equity Income fund factsheets don't provide a full dividend history, even though many asset management groups agree this is vital information for investors. Even more worrying was the fact that more than 10 per cent do not even include the yield, the most basic piece of income information.
An FE Trustnet poll indicated that 78 per cent of our readers found the amount of income information provided by fund groups was inadequate.
We will be returning to the campaign in the New Year to put more pressure on firms to increase transparency.
Martin Gray’s exit: A bad omen for markets and fund management?
While editor Joshua Ausden is not one to blow his own trumpet – no, really – he wanted to draw attention to this article he wrote in June after Martin Gray’s (pictured) departure from the CF Miton Special Situations Portfolio.
In it, he drew parallels with Phillips & Drew fund manager Tony Dye, who in 1995 argued that equity markets were too expensive. His ultra-bearish stance led to him underperforming for five years before he was eventually sacked – just months before the bursting of the dotcom bubble.
Ausden asked whether Gray’s exit would also be followed by a market crash, and sure enough within months the FTSE 100 fell by 12.05 per cent from its 2014 peak of 6,904.86 down to 6,072.68.
Is a full-blown market correction in sight?
Gray’s exit wasn’t the only sign of a gathering storm. In this article, Paul Warner, managing director of Minerva, told reporter Daniel Lanyon he had increased his cash weighting to 11 per cent in anticipation of a 10 to 15 per cent correction.
Chris Beauchamp, market analyst for IG, also predicted more pain for equity investors, but while both were right about the direction of markets, they were slightly off the mark with regard to the cause – both said Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was likely to be behind any crash, when in reality it was caused by the plummeting oil price.
The funds Mark Dampier holds in his pension portfolio
While this type of story may not be as attention-grabbing as predicting an all-out equity crash, it is arguably of far more use to FE Trustnet readers.
By getting Mark Dampier, Hargreaves Lansdown’s head of research, to disclose his full pension holdings, Ausden gave investors a fantastic insight into what a strong and well balanced portfolio should look like.
Among Dampier’s largest holdings are Giles Hargreave's Marlborough Micro Cap and Nano Cap funds and Neil Woodford’s CF Woodford Equity Income portfolio. He also owns some more obscure investments, such as Darwin Leisure Property, a fund that renovates run-down caravan sites.
