An independent (financial adviser’s) view

My post-budget “could have been worse” doesn’t really cover it, does it? And I don’t think a millennial’s “it is what it is” cuts it either. As we’re on the post-Bonfire Night and Remembrance Day path downhill to Christmas, how about a Tiny Tim “God bless us, one and all“? No-one expected him to win, but everyone is now saying it was obvious that he would. And scrambling to be his friend. And stock markets went up, see below...Anyway, despite the fake news that global warming is a hoax, I’m amazingly typing this outside in mid-November sunshine, not in shorts but certainly jumper-less and making hay while Amanda Hanley by Design plants bulbs. A glimpse into a lovely, lucky, first-world Sunday.?

“Industry reacts to implications of Trump presidency”

‘I’m sad for my country, but not my portfolio’, commented one US fund manager and political pundit. And that, to a greater or lesser extent depending on your position in the US food chain, is how a majority of Americans voted. The greater or lesser extent being whether you believed he might get you a pay rise or a job, or rocket the price of your Tesla shares still higher to increase your billionaire-dom. Whether the big jump in US stockmarkets was based on the idea that President Elect (as it seems we have to call him, listen to any news bulletin) will be good for business or, my theory, relief that, for now, civil war has been averted. Well, who knows, but markets generally hate uncertainty, and, one way or another, we have certainty, at least about who will be president. What’s good for shares was not so good for bonds, loans to the US government, where it’s been assumed that interest rates may have to go up again; even though he’s promised to ‘end inflation’. In the words of cover of ‘The Economist’: ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

“Bank of England lowers base rate to 4.75%”

In other more parochial news, UK interest rates have moved down by 0.25% to 4.75%. ‘At last’, if you have a mortgage with a fixed rate coming to an end, ‘oh, bother’, if you have money in the bank. OK, it’s not a lot, and it doesn’t mean that inflation is no more, just that it isn’t as much. All good for the moment, but the Budget and its longer-term effects could make this either short-lived or ensure that they won’t go down much further. The fact that, however it’s disguised as a ‘change to the fiscal rules’, the government will be borrowing more has meant that those speculating on future interest rates have speculated upwards. And more government spending, and, if it happens, more growth and more money in our/your pockets could mean, yes, more inflation as more money chases less stuff and prices go up to cover the extra costs the Budget has imposed on business and so it goes round. Anyway, falling interest rates are more often than not good for share prices, particularly those of smaller companies. Accentuate the positive.

“‘AI could mean advisers can take on 500 clients'”

The ‘optimum’ number of clients which an adviser can effectively look after is much discussed at all levels in our business. For those outside it might sound like the ‘how many angels can fit on??the head of a pin’ theological argument, and one person’s ‘looked after’ can be another’s ‘they charge me a fortune and I only hear from them once a year’. How can AI help? Not by sending robo-advisers to sit on your sofa but, this article argues, by cutting down the hours of report writing which our super-regulated business requires, and freeing up the time of the real-life people whose time and reassurance most clients want and need. ‘Ask 100 advisers and you’ll get 100 different answers’, it also says, and it will ever be thus, as it remains, for better, I’d say, a people- and not tech-led profession; see earlier articles on the proliferation of small firms which comprise 80% of the adviser population. And while not everyone wants their hands metaphorically holding, and internet DIY is great for many, many still do. Hopefully and thankfully.

“FOS complaints surge by more than 40% in first half of 2024”

Robbie Williams hit the rock bottom of depression because of the one or two (in the Daily Mail and on Never Mind…) who said he was rubbish, despite the hundreds of thousands who adored him in huge stadiums. Talk to any financial adviser, and it’s the same with the one complainant from hundreds of satisfied clients. The statistical good news is still better, as only around 3% of the total received by FOS, the Financial Ombudsman Service are against advisers, and the overall ‘uphold’ rate is only around 35%. Banks and credit cards still make up the huge majority, and they do, of course, have whole departments dedicated to dealing with them. For most smaller advisers, it’s a very personal and stressful thing. Of course, if we get it wrong, we get it wrong but I’ve talked to many for whom that single complaint becomes a sleep-depriving obsession until it’s resolved, one way or another. The flip side, perhaps, of ‘small is beautiful’.

The Beatles rise to fame is a story told many times, but mostly in documentary format and from the point of view of the Fab Four themselves. The ‘Midas Man’ is Brian Epstein, the record store manager who spotted them (and Cilla) at the Cavern Club in Liverpool and decided he was the one to make them famous. And while a very convincing bootleg version of the Beatles are a big part of it, the story is that of Epstein himself, Jewish and gay in a time when the former was not favoured and the latter illegal, and dead of an overdose at 32. It’s very well done, captures the excitement of the age and those playing John, Paul, George Ringo and a very young Cilla, while not identikits, have them to a tee. He left one heck of a legacy in his short life, the band started to fall apart without him and the rest is history. And it was really all down to his parents, Eddie Marsan as the father who can never show love, Emily Watson as the mother who should have done more. All for free (if you pay) on Amazon Prime.