Lawrence Gosling

Much is always made by asset management groups about the structure of their companies or the remuneration of the fund managers being ‘aligned' with their investors and shareholders.

There is a fit and proper test in football for anyone who wants to buy a football club, which is a joke, and, judging by recent conversations I have been having, the equivalent expression for our industry is sounding like an equal joke in some cases....

Fifteen years ago I did not look like this and I did not have this column - I was far too shy to have a picture of myself in the first issue - or in fact any issue until a few years ago. How times change.

I have got to say I could not give a flake who owns Cadbury.

It is that time of year when we all seemed to spend a lot of time predicting - or more likely - guessing what are going to be the top-performing asset classes during the year next 10 years.

It would be great to think because we have started not only a new year, but a new decade, that life would be rosy. It is not.

As it is the end of the year, I have been sorting out a lot of old bits of paper and came across an article in a consumer magazine Investors Week, which I edited at the beginning of the decade.

So is it now more tax efficient to invest in a game of bingo than make a pension contribution or start an Isa?

I can take no credit for the following analogy - it is all the original work of one of the smartest sales and marketing directors in the asset management industry.

To float or not to float - that is the question.