David Oakley

I am writing this column at my dining room table. It is early in the morning and still dark. The birds have started to sing and the cat has been fed. I am ready to write. This is the ideal environment for me to write my column. So it should be good. Or that is the theory. Like me, more active fund managers are analysing the environment that helps them produce their best work. In their case, their best trades. Last week a new company launched software to help fund managers assess the perfect cir…

Football is big business. The World Cup, which kicked off in Brazil on Thursday, is expected to generate $4bn in revenue for the governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, more commonly known as Fifa. Fifa will make so much money because thousands of people will travel to Brazil, or more importantly watch the World Cup on television – most of the revenue will come from television and marketing rights. The competition’s popularity is due to the fact that it is the qua…

Vanguard is on the march. The pioneer of low cost index funds is winning more business at the expense of active managers as it cuts fees to the bone. While it offers better performance than many active managers by simply tracking the market, its average charge globally is just 0.19 per cent compared with an industry average of 1.08 per cent. This largely explains why the group is attracting so much money. In the first half of the year $64bn flowed into the group’s US mutual funds and €3bn flow…

What is the definition of a hedge fund? A fee structure in search of a client to rip off, or so I was reminded by an equity portfolio manager at one of the more traditional, long-only asset management groups last week. Although he was recounting an old financial joke, he was making a serious point about why Calpers, the largest public sector pension fund in the US, had just announced it was ditching its hedge fund portfolios. The Californian group said complex and costly fees were part of the…

UK chief executive pay, explained in charts

The transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth to the next generation — at hundreds of millions of family businesses around the world — has the potential to put trade deals, revenues and jobs at risk if it is not properly managed, according to industry figures. “While some families have been preparing their next generation for decades to assume leadership roles, others lack adequate plans for succession,” warns Rebecca Gooch, global head of insights at Deloitte Private, a division of the Big Fo…

Inflationary shocks have reverberated around the globe over the past three years — but the world’s wealthy have largely weathered them, say private bankers and investment managers. Despite a sustained period of higher outgoings — with headline annual inflation still at 3.5 per cent in the US and 2.4 per cent in the eurozone after hitting multi-decade highs two years ago — the world’s billionaires and ultra rich have grown wealthier, according to US media group Forbes. Industry figures say the…

It has been a rocky ride for investors in some parts of the property market — the favourite asset class of the wealthy — since the coronavirus outbreak four years ago. The office sector has been the main casualty as people continue to work from home against a tough economic backdrop of higher interest rates. The slump has been global. Across Europe office valuations have tumbled more than 30 per cent in cities such as London, Brussels and Zurich since the end of 2019, according to real estate r…

The world’s richest families are increasingly channelling their wealth into combating climate change, by allocating trillions of dollars to sustainable investments, according to industry advisers and asset managers. Globally, nearly half of family offices — which handle the personal wealth of the ultra-rich — are investing in sustainability, says Rebecca Gooch, head of insights at Deloitte Private, a division of the Big Four accountancy group. “Climate change is such a large-scale issue that m…

The family office, which handles the investments of the ultra-rich, has become one of the fastest generators of wealth in the world from the US to Hong Kong and Singapore. An institution that dates back more than 150 years — when American financier John Pierpont Morgan first came up with the term to describe the personal investment arm for his growing art collection — has become a cornerstone of the financial system. The sector has expanded from a small number of groups in the 1980s to about 15…