Money Makers

Lee Gardhouse is the Chief Investment Office of Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s largest stock and fund broking firm, which boasts 950,000 active clients and administers or manages £79 billion of client money on its platform. His responsibilities include researching the firm’s influential Wealth 150 list of favourite funds and managing its range of in-house multi-manager funds. In the latest Money Makers podcast, he and Jonathan Davis discuss the way that HL chooses funds - a highly topical issue in the wake of the regulator’s forthcoming review of how investment platforms research, rate and charge for the funds they put on their best buy lists, Lee also explains whyHargreaves Lansdown recently published its own assessment of how well its Wealth 150 selections have performed - and candidly assesses both tis strengths and weaknesses of its methods.

In this week’s Money Makers podcast Jonathan Davis talks to Keith Ashworth-Lord, manager of the Sanford DeLand UK Buffetology fund, about his investment philosophy and current portfolio. A former City analyst, Mr Ashworth-Lord has put in a strong performance since moving into fund management with his specialist small and mid-cap fund. Many professional investors name check Warren Buffett as an inspiration, but what exactly are the key principles that other professional investors can usefully incorporate into their methods - and how well do they translate to the UK market?

In our latest Money Makers podcast we turn our attention to venture capital trusts, specialist investment vehicles which put investors’ capital to work in higher risk, early-stage businesses. VCTs, as they are known, offer significant potential tax benefits for those prepared to risk their money in this way. This year the marketing of VCTs has started earlier than normal. Why is that – and what else do potential investors need to know about the VCT market this year? Are the tax benefits worth the rewards? Chris Hutchinson, lead manager of the £150m Unicorn AIM VCT, the largest VCT specialising in AIM-listed companies, is the man on the other side of the microphone for this in-depth discussion.

What the oil price does next is key: Fund manager Charlie Morris gives his take on where markets are heading In this week’s Money Makers podcast, one of our regular big picture market roundups, Jonathan Davis talks to Charlie Morris, Investment Director at Newscape Capital, and editor of the Fleet Street Letter, about the latest developments in the UK and global markets - and what they mean for investors' portfolios. The oil price holds the key to future developments, he argues.

In the latest Money Makers podcast Jonathan Davis returns to talk to a fund manager whose multi-cap equity fund has the distinction, according to research by FE Trustnet, of having outperformed its benchmark in every rolling five year period since 2000 - one of only two funds out of several hundred in the UK All Companies sector to have done so. The fund manager in question is Richard Hallett, whose Marlborough UK Multi-Cap Growth fund, has as its name suggests the freedom to invest across the UK market spectrum, from the Footsie 100 index all the way down to AIM. The fund has returned more than 325% since 2000, when it was originally run by Giles Hargreave, and 295% since 2005 when Richard Hallett took it over. I last caught up with this fund manager just over a year ago, before the Brexit referendum.

No need to panic over Brexit or the market In our latest Money Makers podcast Chris Sexton, Investment Director of Saunderson House, a fee-based wealth management firm, offers his perspective on the outlook for markets, cautions against reading too much into media headlines and explains why investment returns are likely to be lower from here. Saunderson House specialises in providing financial planning and portfolio management services to private clients, including many lawyers, accountants and other City professionals.

What is a fair fee to pay for the services of a wealth manager or financial adviser? There is a widespread suspicion that in many cases the answer is: less than you are paying now - if only you could get behind the figures to find out what the real all-in costs, including add-ons, actually are. Next year new regulations will force managers of other people’s money to disclose much more information about their charges. In this latest podcast Jonathan Davis asks Graham Harrison, MD of Asset Risk Consultants (ARC), the company that monitors the performance of the great majority of private client firms in the UK, to explain how he thinks investors should work out what a fair fee is - and how best to get value for money in future. If Canadian experience is any guide, he says, the results could well surprise you - this is a must listen for anyone whose money is professionally managed.

In our latest podcast the independent economist Peter Warburton explains why he thinks we are heading for a period of stagflation - a combination of slow growth and rising inflation - which will require investors to make changes in the way they allocate their investment assets.

The Investment trust sector has changed a lot over the past 20 years, as traditional buyers in wealth management firms retreat and a new generation of more sophisticated DIY investors look to exploit the advantages of closed-end funds. In the latest Money Makers podcast, Nick Greenwood, manager of Miton Global Opportunities, a specialist investment trust fund, discusses these changes with Money Makers editor Jonathan Davis and highlights the themes and special situations that have been driving his trust’s own strong recent performance.

While the UK and French elections are grabbing all the market and media attention, the most important issue most investors face is to get their medium- and long-term asset allocation right – which means getting the right side of the underlying cycles that drive market behaviour beyond the noise and excitement of immediate political events. Few market analysts are as well placed to make those judgments as Robin Griffiths, the Head of Multi-Asset Research at ECU, who has been analysing the ups and downs of financial market cycles in the City for no fewer than five decades. In this wide-ranging podcast, the latest in the Money Makers series, editor Jonathan Davis asked him for his views on how each of the major asset classes are likely to develop from here, starting with the bond market – the key to everything else.

Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election on June 8th took Westminster and the financial markets by surprise. What does it mean for the Brexit negotiations and investors? That was the question I discuss this week with three leading market commentators in a special edition of the Money Makers weekly podcast. The three expert voices you will hear are those of Mark Dampier, Head of Research at Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s largest online broker, Charles Morris, editor of the Fleet Street Letter, and Tim Price, the founder of Price Value Partners, and a regular commentator in Money Week and other publications.

In this week’s Money Makers podcast Jonathan Davis spends 40 minutes talking to the market strategist Eoin Treacy about his latest views on equity markets, bonds, currencies and the outlook for inflation.

Are there good opportunities in the investment trust sector at the moment – and if so where? After such a strong run have the world’s equity markets risen too far too fast? Jonathan Davis puts these questions to Richard Curling, who runs a fund of investment trusts for Jupiter Asset Management, as part of a wide-ranging discussion about the markets and the closed end fund sector in the latest Money Makers podcast. Often known as the City’s best kept secret, the best investment trusts consistently outperform their open-ended equivalents, but you have to know how and where to look for them.

Resource stocks made a strong recovery in 2016 after a torrid bear market, with both oil and mining companies heading the index performance tables. Few professional investors were more exposed to this rollercoaster ride than Angelos Damaskos, the manager of two specialist small cap commodity funds widely followed by private investors, Junior Oil and Junior Gold. In the latest Money Makers podcast he gives his views on the two sectors now – where he thinks commodity prices are heading and how he is positioning his funds for that environment.

In the latest Money Makers podcast we catch up again with Chris Hutchinson, lead fund manager at Unicorn Asset Management, the boutique small cap and AIM fund management firm that boasts one of the best long-term records in its universe. How has the fund coped with the fallout from Brexit and Trump’s election? What are the prospects for future returns? And why despite strong demand has the firm capped new applications to its market-leading AIM venture capital trust at just 10% of assets?

The Trump rally has taken the world’s equity markets to new highs in many countries, and together with the fall in the value of the pound, has made the past year among the best 12-month periods for investors in living memory. What next? Can the good times keep rolling? In the latest Money Makers podcast I sit down with Mark Dampier, Head of Research at Hargreaves Lansdown, the number one platform for private investors in the UK, to discuss the market outlook and where the best opportunities and greatest risks lie now (30 minutes)

An interview with Gervais Williams, Managing Director of Miton Group plc and author of new book The Retreat of Globalisation

Fund manager Chris Rice expects a downturn as unemployment and interest rates turn - discover why in this interview with Money Maker's editor Jonathan Davis.

The Harriman Stock Market Almanac is an annual publication which is a must-read for all fans of stock market investing – it combines a mixture of some trivial but amusing anecdotes and facts about the stock market with some more interesting analysis of trends that recur each year and other kinds of anomalies: things that, theoretically at least, you can make some money out of if you are aware of them. In this podcast, Jonathan Davis speaks with Almanac editor and investor Stephen Eckett about several of these anomalies – and what investors can do to take advantage of them.

Paul Jourdan is the CEO of Amati Global Investors. With his colleagues, a team of three, he runs three funds that specialise in small-cap and unquoted stocks. In this podcast, Jonathan Davis asks Paul how where we are in the market cycle has affected small caps, what the impact of Brexit looks like, and what makes for an ideal small company from an investor's perspective.