Goslings Grouse: Sorting the wheat from the chaff

GOSLING'S GROUSE

Pioneer Investments, part of the Italian banking group UniCredit, estimates there are 1,680 asset management companies around Europe, which in turn manage about 37,000 funds.

Of these 37,000 funds, only 38 accounted for 100% of the net inflows to all funds across Europe over the past few years. Dig a bit deeper and you see that in any one sector or fund category, five funds usually account for over 90% of all fund flows – what asset management executives would call ‘category killers.’ For me this was a frightening set of statistics, which does not take into account the rise of ETFs which, according to Lyxor, now account for something like 5%-10% of fund sales depending on the asset class. An adviser post-RDR who wants to be called truly independent is n...