There are eleven types of mutual fund: knowing them will help you find the good and avoid the bad. — Spend time studying funds, and you’ll begin to recognise “types” that crop up over and over again. Get to know these types (there are eleven of them) and you’re on your way to understanding which funds to hold, and which to avoid like the plague. I originally identified these when…

The lessons to be learned from one of the UK’s fund management greats. — The above fund has a personal edge for me. Its sister fund, Stewart Investors Asia Pacific Leaders, was one of the first I inherited when I began analysing funds for Premier in 2007. It’s manager, Angus Tulloch, was generous enough to spend time humouring a rooky fund picker, and although…

The fund management industry has a few beliefs that are followed without question. Here are two of them. — Professional fund buyers have rules of thumb; shortcuts that tune out the noise to zone in on funds that (we hope) will work like a dream. But rules of thumb are, by definition, inaccurate. They have exceptions. And where there are exceptions, there are opportunities. Opportunities to make better returns…

Some fund managers perform well but then turn out to be duds. How can you spot them in advance? — During the pandemic we all learned about ‘false positives’, a concept previously confined to drug testing and statistics. The appearance of two little red lines, when there should have been one, caused all sorts of avoidable chaos. False positives are rife in the investment world too: There are plenty of…

Imagining your portfolio in different conditions to today is useful. But it’s also dangerous. It’s important to know why. — Stress testing your portfolio is a good idea. If done well, it lets you peep at the future, helping you swerve problems down the road. But if done badly, which it often is, it can give you a false sense of security; telling you to accelerate when you should have…

Some funds carry serious liquidity risks. If you’re caught in the wrong one you could lose a lot. How can you tell if you are? — When conceiving and creating our new funds, I obsessively asked one question: What could kill them? Because it’s an obvious — but frequently overlooked — fact that survival is a necessary ingredient of success. Fund liquidity is one such killer. So I’m hot on it. You’d love my single, catch-all…

Here’s one simple exercise for quickly improving your investment returns. — It’s New Year: Many of you are on new diets, or at least were for a couple of days three weeks ago. Because yes; most don’t last, and therefore don’t work. But one type of diet does work: The Elimination Diet. It helps you to figure out what foods are hurting you. And once you know, say, shellfish knocks you flat for 24 hours, it becomes harder to eat it again knowing the pain that will follow.

What if you started your investment portfolio again, from scratch? — Originally published in Citywire, January 2022: Most things in investing, as in life, are the result of evolution. This means that, contrary to what the presentations imply, portfolios aren’t built and rebuilt from scratch each month. Instead, they’re constantly tweaked: Maybe last month you switched in a couple of new…

What can investors learn from this classic movie? — This is the third of three annual silly-season notes I wrote looking at how characters from great movies would fare as mutual fund managers (third of four if you include the controversial and unpublished Marvel Avengers ‘ESG’ special from 2019). They’re tongue-in-cheek, but only partly. I’d get carried away in…