Investing

Families come in all shapes and sizes – some you’re born into, some you choose, and some who choose you. Here are our top tips for managing the finances of your family, whatever yours looks like.

In this video, Nutmeg explains how compounding can accelerate your investment returns.

The scale and nature of government bonds mean they are core holdings in almost all investment portfolios. But do they have a natural home in socially responsible portfolios, and if so, how are they assessed for environmental, social and governance factors?

We have written that volatility is part of every investor’s journey and long-term investors with diversified portfolios should see volatility as a normal part of investing. There are many ways to improve portfolio construction and one method that has gained academic and practitioner support targets low volatility equities. What does this mean?

Poor performance, illiquid assets, limited transparency – the decline of the Woodford Equity Income Fund has revealed all that’s wrong with the conventional fund management business. There has to be a better way.

The ETF industry continues to be a victim of its own success, with exceptional growth followed by criticism from other industry participants. Most recently Michael Burry, made famous by the book and later the film The Big Short, has added his name to the list of critics. So, should investors be worried about the growth in popularity of ETFs?

An exposé by an anonymous ex-adviser for St James’s Place, the UK wealth manager, was published recently in the Times. The accounts of the lavish entertainments the company is said to have provided for the advisers who serve its clients are eye-opening.

The increasing gridlock between the United States and China on trade has buffeted the global industrial production cycle. As a result, economies heavily weighted to industrial production, such as Japan, Germany and South Korea, could well slip into recession. Recently, the recession narrative has extended to the US as the shape of its yield curve has become negative (or inverted). But just hold on a minute!

It’s common knowledge that choosing a stock picker who can beat the market over the long term is very difficult. But some investors still try, in the pursuit of those managers with the skill to identify stocks that will outperform. Yet even for those stock pickers who do deliver, our analysis suggests much of their performance is less due to skill than to investing in small companies.

A recent academic study has found that a tiny fraction of stocks are behind the majority of global equity returns since 1990. The findings underline how hard it is to succeed at stock picking and highlight the value of Nutmeg’s investment process, which invests “passively” to buy entire equity indices at a time.

Brexit is still top of mind for UK citizens and investors, as a new prime minister takes the helm and the Brexit saga enters a new chapter. In this environment, customers often ask us the question, “How much exposure do I have to the UK?”. Although we show a simple geographical breakdown within the portfolio, analysing the underlying exposure reveals a more complicated and interesting picture.

You may have recently come across the term gating, which is the practice of temporarily blocking withdrawals from an investment fund – imagine putting up a gate to stop money coming out. In this blog we explain why fund managers and their corporate directors are sometimes forced to take this step, and whether it could ever happen in the exchange-traded fund (ETF) market that Nutmeg invests in.