Investing in one or more asset classes
Investing in funds provides a simple and effective method of diversification. Because your money is pooled together with that of other investors, each fund is large enough to diversify across hundreds and even thousands of individual companies and assets. A pooled (or collective) investment is a fund into which many people put their money, which is then invested in one or more asset classes by a fund manager.
There are different types of pooled investment but the main ones are:
Open-ended investment funds
Unit trusts
Investment trusts
Investment bonds
Endowments
Good return for investors
Most pooled investment funds are actively managed. The fund manager researches the market and buys and sells assets to try and provide a good return for investors.
Trackers, on the other hand, are passively managed, they simply aim to track the market in which they are invested. For example, a FTSE100 tracker would aim to replicate the movement of the FTSE100 (the index of the largest 100 UK companies).
They might do this by buying the equivalent proportion of all the shares in the index.
For technical reasons the return is rarely identical to the index, in particular because charges need to be deducted.
Actively managed fund
Trackers tend to have lower charges than actively-managed funds. This is because a fund manager running an actively-managed fund is paid to invest so as to do better than the index (beat the market) or to generate a steadier return for investors than tracking the index would achieve. Of course the fund manager could make the wrong decisions and under-perform the market. And there is no guarantee that an actively-managed fund that performs well in one year will continue to do so. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
Trackers do not beat or under-perform the market (except as already noted), but they are not necessarily less risky than actively-managed funds invested in the same asset class. Open-ended investment funds and investment trusts can both be trackers.
NFORMATION IS BASED ON OUR CURRENT UNDERSTANDING OF TAXATION LEGISLATION AND REGULATIONS. ANY LEVELS AND
BASES OF, AND RELIEFS FROM, TAXATION ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
THE VALUE OF INVESTMENTS AND INCOME FROM THEM MAY GO DOWN. YOU MAY NOT GET BACK THE ORIGINAL AMOUNT INVESTED.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NOT A RELIABLE INDICATOR OF FUTURE PERFORMANCE.
