RAPID RESPONSES
Get up, stand up
Great article by Gina Miller (Join our campaign to fight fund managers’ high fees and lack of transparency, Wednesday). Financial services, as an industry, has always been overpriced for the value it adds.
Transparent performance related charges for investment products is the way to go, especially if they are returnable when performance is poor or negative.
Taking a percentage whether a fund does well or badly is hardly aligning objectives. That’s why some investors look to see what personal stake a fund manager has in their fund. Equally, charges should be calculated over longer periods of time to minimise the effect of short-term volatility. It’s high time fund managers were paid by the hour – as other professionals such as lawyers, accountants, consultants, whose expertise are – not arbitrary percentages.
Chris Charlton
I have given my money to a selection of fund managers in the hope that they will somehow make it grow. They choose the specific shares in which to invest my money, for which I pay them an annual fee. But there is another way of investing. You can invest in an index tracker fund, where your cash buys a representative basket of shares from an index. There is no active fund manager, so consequently there’s a much lower annual fee.
Very often I receive news that my actively managed shares has under-performed the computer controlled index fund. This begs a simple question: what are we paying the fund manager for? We pay them to fly business class, have lunch at the best restaurants with various chief executives and sit in box on the centre court at Wimbledon.
I propose a solution. Where the active fund manager underperforms the computer controlled benchmark index fund, the active fund manager takes no fee. Where they beat the index they get their fee. Fair and simple.
Orall Cornelius
………………..
Defend occupation
Allister Heath is right is his call encouraging business leaders to make their case publicly (Bosses must engage with the media, Tuesday). We face the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, the impact of which is being felt extremely widely. No one pretends that the route back to prosperity is straightforward, but it certainly has to start with an open conversation.
Naomi Colvin
Occupy London
………………..
History lessens
Your article (Apprenticeships in Britain plainly have not worked, yesterday) indicates that the two lecturers from the London School of Economics have a woeful lack of knowledge of the modern livery movement. The concentration in the article is on what happened in the past, as opposed to what is happening now. This was immensely depressing and risks undermining sensible initiatives to improve the lot of the nation’s youth.
The Goldsmiths’ Company has operated a successful apprenticeship scheme for centuries, and today it remains highly pertinent to the trade of the goldsmith. The scale is necessarily small, but there are currently 24 young individuals enrolled in apprenticeships varying in duration from 3 to 5 years. On completion of the apprenticeship, they receive a level 4 licentiateship (City & Guilds).
The Goldsmiths’ Company has also been instrumental in developing national occupational standards (NOS), in partnership with Creative and Cultural Skills, which in turn will enable significant numbers of young people to gain meaningful qualifications across academia and industry.
The modern livery movement has much to offer.
Dick G Melly
The Goldsmiths’ Company
Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis discussed the apprenticeship system with references dating from 1390 to 1700. If one discussed medicine using the same timeframe, one might come to a similar conclusion: that the medical establishment was ineffective and that we should all go back to being treated by witchdoctors.
The apprenticeship system worked well, especially in the manufacturing industries using day release, as it allowed on-the-job training at little cost to the trainee (no debt at the end). The main disadvantage was, that at least in the 1970s, one could not migrate from courses such as the Higher National Certificate (HNC) and diploma to degree level without starting from the beginning again.
There were several reasons why these part time courses began to vanish in manufacturing. This was partly attributed to the unions demanding full pay for trainees. Much of the manufacturing industry which supported apprenticeships closed or moved production overseas and the establishment preferred training in universities to a degree level. This, of course, has now become prohibitively expensive for some students and applications to universities are falling.
There is nothing wrong with apprenticeships, which should have some academic rigour incorporated and allow migration to a higher level.
Derek Coggrave
………………..
Top tweets
Claire Billings
@clairebillabong
Good advice from Morning Wire today saying that city bosses such as Hester should talk to the press more.
Mike Bokaie
@bokmike
Agree that Tories, Labour, Lib Dems are all anti-business. Fed up with their relentless attacks on corporate Britain.
Jonathan Davis @JonathanDavisWM
CityAM on Hester’s pay at RBS: “No bank must ever be bailed out again” 100% agreed.