Cracking the value equation

CONTRARIAN INVESTOR

A couple of weeks back, readers of this column will recall I floated the idea financial advisers and IFAs need to examine innovative ideas to capture the greater share of the value created in the investment process.

Why, I questioned, couldn’t advisers gather together and set up structures and businesses that attempted to capture the asset management bit of the value equation, rather than give it all away to the big fund managers, along the way making the bosses at Jupiter very wealthy. Over the last few weeks, a number of very different ideas have been suggested to me that attempt to do precisely this. If I could brutally summarise these ideas, they seem to fall into three rough groupings. The first involves advisers collectively gathering together to build forms of infrastructure that manage var...