transparency when investing

A

amandstu

Registered User
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Suppose you leave some money with a financial group and the deal is that your return is to be based in part or in whole on the value of particular shares....

If you go ahead with this arangement what entitlement do you have of verifying that the returns you get are correct?

As a generality is one to expect that the portfolio ascribed to your investment would change from day to day (I appreciate that this could vary from one scheme to the next) ?

Is there any reason to suppose that a scheme based in Ireland would base the portfolio in Irish listed shares?

Would this scheme be barred from using its own shares (or shares from a company closely related)?

thanks !
 
This is very vague. You would need to give some specifics.

It sounds dodgy. Is the "financial group" authorised by the Central Bank?
 
Maybe it is dodgy (that is why I am asking) but maybe it is just me being paranoid.
Yes I am talking about a very well known and presumably very reputable "group" (can't possibly imagine it is not authorised by the Central Bank -would almost even feel a fool for asking them that) .

That I don't want to say who it is might say more about myself than them (I wouldn't have unrealistic expectations regarding peoples' honesty but I figure you normally would have safety in numbers anyway).

But this was the first time that I did anything along these lines and so I never had the benefit of that kind of experience.....
 
There really is no point in such a vague post.

If you don't want to give details of the company or product, then you will not find any useful information here.

Have you already made the investment?
 
Well I am disappointed at being asked to give names but it is a Bank of Ireland SSI PIP account (New Ireland I think it is).
I opened the account the same time as everyone else.
Does that make the post less vague?
 
Well it helps to answer your question.

New Ireland is regulated by the Central Bank.

Is that a very old fund? Was it specifically restricted to Irish shares? They publish the prices very openly and you can chart their performance against the Irish ISEQ index.

Most funds underperform the index due to charges. If it was an old fund, the charges may have been particularly high. Was it linked to an endowment mortgage?
 
OP. Many of the questions you have asked are particular and the answers, in fairness to the Financial Provider as in most funds, will be answered in the Prospectus of the Fund.

Brendan has clearly answered some of your queries, but it is well published in much of the press (UK especially) that charges in old fashioned funds eat up Investor money. ETFs are the route to go IMO. Check out the forum on ETFs for further clarity.



As a point of note, when it comes to Investments "DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH"
 
Well the start date to the policy was April 2002 .

The Government then (was it Bertie or was it Brian or was it Charlie?) thought up a scheme whereby in return for a monthly deposit of up to a maximum of 200 punts over 5 years the Government would top up the investment by 25% ( a no brainer it was ,perhaps rightly, called).

I think May 2007 was the cut off point to the scheme (I am sure you must know all this) and so when the account matured I just left the money in .

When I opened the account I was asked to choose between a safety/risk ratio and I chose risky but not really risky.Also I seem to remember being given the option of a proportion of the account being based not on shares but just like an ordinary deposit account and I think I may have chosen 2>1 in favour of shares..

I did get policy documents that I still have but it doesn't mention any of those safe/risky of share vs deposit ratios in it.

So I have never known whether the shares they were investing in on my behalf were Irish based or otherwise.

No it wasn't linked to an endowment mortgage.

Where do they publish the prices ? Is it on the New Ireland website?

When I look at my documentation (for the first time in 11 years!) I can see that the charges they deduct were 2.75% but I don't know if they are continuing to be applied since I no longer make any deposits or regular savings into the account since it matured in 2007.
 
OK, you had a normal Special Savings Investment Account with high charges.

You made the choice on your application form as to which funds you invested in.

There was an option to choose just Irish shares. There was probably an option to choose just Asian shares. Have you not received updates since you took it out? They should have sent statements annually, I think. You certainly would have got one when it matured after 5 years and again you would have been given an option of what to do with it.

I presume that when it matured, you chose to switch it to one of their normal funds - either deliberately or by default.

Brendan
 
I have to come clean.I have rummaged through my documents saved away down the years and ,to my surprise ,I have come up with most of the answer to my question in that the BoiLife people did in fact send me out a resume of how my investment was performing (they weren't sending out statements on a regular basis so I did have to ask for this informationat the time but it is pretty complete)

I have a breakdown , in 2008 of the then current geographical (very wide)and asset (equities @74% of total) split.

I apologise for not doing this rummage previously but I had practically grown myself a "false memory" in that I had of course seen those documents at the time but had not taken them in correctly but carried on since assuming that it was mostly Iseq based equities I was involved with.

I assume I would be right about that ? If the equities are spread geographically to include ,say, Pac Basin equities along with Jap, N.American ,Irish , et al etc etc does that mean that the ISEQ is a pretty poor measure of how my fund is and has been performing?

Or maybe those "foreign" equities would still have to be listed on the Irish Stock Exchange in which case the Iseq would seem to be a much closer measure? (I am ignorant on that question although I would lean to the former explanation)

ps I can't have been that paranoid after all if that information I just recovered was so easily let lie....
 
Some funds have what is known as a "benchmark index" against which they assess their own performance.

As yours is a diverse managed fund, it is unlikely that there would such a benchmark.

Check if you are still being charged 2.75% annuallly. If so, you should consider switching to a cheaper fund. If the fund is down on the value at which you bought it, then you probably should stay in until your losses are recovered, as any recovery of losses would be tax-free.

The price you bought in at may be the price at which you went into the fund after the SSIA matured. Check that with the provider.
 
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