May #2 In a completely unsurprising turn of events, the Tories have not done well at the recent local elections. Can you feel the shock waves running through Parliament? No,.
Read moreMonday Musings 04/09/2023
A wise man once told me you should know your competitors in business almost as well as you know yourself. People outside of our business often assume St James’s Place (SJP) and their agents are competitors of ours. They aren’t, for a number of good reasons.
Most importantly they are not fully Independent, which means they cannot look to the whole of the market when advising on pension, investment or protection products. They are a restricts advise network and can only advise on SJP branded product. How much of the market does this exclude them from? One article I read stated that SJP cannot advise on, or have access to, 99.3% of the pension, investment and unit trust market available to UK investors. That’s a sizeable chunk their clients are missing out on.
As you know, Straight Talk are independent advisers and therefore have whole of market reach. We have our ethos and core strategies, but we have the knowledge, scope and access to go outside of these if its in our clients’ best interest to do so. We meet with a broad range of providers regularly to make sure we’re up to speed with what’s currently available.
We’re a very different kettle of fish. And thank goodness. But all the same its still sensible to have an ear to industry ground, and sometimes we hear interesting things.
For example, SJP have offered bank accounts to its clients through its own St James’s Place Bank in the past. It moved these accounts over to Intelligent Finance (owned by the Lloyds Bank group, who also used to have majority ownership of SJP), but on the 1st of August Intelligent Finances closed its accounts and around 18,000 SJP clients were forced to find new bank accounts. Not an insurmountable problem, but hardly ideal.
Then we see an article that says ‘Customers of St James’s Place…will almost always achieve poor returns due to its advice charges – that’s according to the company’s own analysis’. And lets of course not forget their rather unique early withdrawal fee should you want to move away from SJP within the first 6 years of investing, which could be up to a huge 6%.
Difference really is something to be celebrated, don’t you think?
So, to the markets
30.12.2022 | 01.09.2023 | % Change | % Change on week | |
FTSE 100 | 7451 | 7464 | Up 0.18 | Up 1.72 |
Dow Jones | 33147 | 34837 | Up 5.09 | Up 1.43 |
Nasdaq | 10466 | 14031 | Up 34.06 | Up 3.25 |
S&P | 3839 | 4515 | Up 17.60 | Up 2.50 |
TOPIX | 1891 | 2349 | Up 24.21 | Up 3.68 |
Hang Seng | 19781 | 18382 | Down 7.07 | Up 2.37 |
Shanghai | 3089 | 3133 | Up 1.42 | Up 2.26 |
CAC 40 | 6473 | 7296 | Up 12.71 | Up 0.93 |
DAX | 13923 | 15840 | Up 13.76 | Up 1.33 |
May #1 One of the challenges with writing these is not so much finding something to write about, it’s that there is so much I could write about! I know.
Read moreNot all of its bleak out there. Sometimes we hear good things in the press. Ok, not often. But sometimes. For example, news came in the press recently that the.
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