Contrarian Investor: The questions for Alliance Trust after 'ambitious restructuring'

Move to fund of funds approach

The king is dead, long love the king. Just a few short years ago, newspapers such as this venerable publication were full of articles (some of them by yours truly) rubbishing the idea of fund of funds.

In their first iteration, we critics lampooned the idea of fees layered upon fees, questioned the efficacy of the monitoring of supposedly top flight alpha managers and generally lamented what we felt to be another marketing wheeze gone wrong.  Of course, fund of funds never went away. In fact, a whole branch of the investment consulting world was quietly beavering on new models to track these consistent outperforming fund managers, ignoring the critics and building new consulting products to sell to wealth managers. More on that later. But fund of funds have now made a triumphant ret...