Jonathan Davis
What the service offers
If you are looking for something extra to help with your investments, joining the Money Makers Circle and receiving our premium content for a modest annual outlay might be the answer.
The content, which is summarised each week in an exclusive member-only email, includes a range of wholly independent features (with no adverts and no sponsored content): all the latest news and data from the investment trust sector, in-depth investment trust profiles, Q and As with professional investors, extracts from my regular diary notes, plus occasional videos.
Too much information
There is so much good information available online for the enquiring investor that you might ask what else a subscription service can offer, even a modestly priced one, such as this, at the equivalent of less than £3 a week. My answer would be summed up in three words: convenience, experience and access. They are the three things that I was looking for when I was starting my investment career many years ago, and the Money Makers Circle is my way of trying to reproduce something of that for others.
If you read the financial media, you will find no shortage of recommendations about what to do with your investments. The problem is twofold: knowing which of the many options to act on and (frequently) the lack of accountability or experience of those suggesting them. As it happens, I am a great admirer of the financial media in this country, but one of the things that I have learnt over the years – being a former national newspaper journalist helps – is that barely five per cent of the prodigious output you can read is worth spending your time on.
Out with the old, in with the new
With the advent of the Internet, the proliferation of content has continued apace, to the point of massive information overload. In the mid-1990s, I was a founding shareholder in The Week, the hugely successful weekly news magazine. Our idea back then was to help readers keep abreast of what the newspapers were saying by filtering out all but the very best articles and then summarising them in a single weekly publication that could absolve the reader from having to read all the others. At the time, printed newspapers were still enjoying a boom after the breaking of the printworkers’ cartel, enabling money and investment to be ploughed into editorial content, and the newspapers expanded prodigiously, becoming heavier by the week.
Since then, the Internet, free and available to everyone, has sent newspapers back into decline. The Daily Telegraph, for example, part of a group I once worked for, has seen its circulation shrink from over a million to around 300,000 copies a day. In its place, we have social media and a torrent of commercially inspired content in which the distinction between editorial and advertorial has become increasingly blurred. All the social media companies, however well-intentioned their founders, are essentially now advertising companies, rewarded for their success in building a network of users that advertisers can exploit.
Conflicts of interest
The big retail platforms mostly provide a valuable service, but when it comes to stock and fund selection, as the Woodford scandal showed, there are some inherent conflicts of interest between the platforms and their customers. It is not as blatant as it was in the bad old days when financial advisers, stockbrokers and platforms still received annually repeating commission from fund management companies for every fund they persuaded their clients to invest in.
But the tension is still there; what investors want more than anything, without always being happy to pay for them, are reliable recommendations about what to invest in. The fund lists that platforms produce (under a variety of titles) are no better than average in identifying the best funds to own, while stockbrokers are prevented by regulation from making recommendations to non-professional clients (and their tips are often not very good either), and the media is so busy making recommendations about every type of investment under the sun that it is virtually impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Meanwhile, all around us is the evidence that more and more investors are looking to take responsibility for their own investments, doing their own research and aiming to acquire the necessary skills to look through the mass of advertising and advertorial to spot what is really of value and what is merely sales material dressed up as other kinds of content. Others are happy to pay for financial planning and investment advice from wealth managers and financial advisers, but sensibly wish to retain the ability to understand and challenge the advice that they are being given.
Looking for the best
If you are one of these people, then the Money Makers Circle could help you. What it offers is somewhat akin to what The Week was set up to do, which is to apply a filter to the flow of financial information bombarding us every day. It seeks to take advantage of my good fortune in having built a reputation and a body of experience that enables me to reach out to a wide circle of professional contacts in search of useful information.
My challenge, as founder and curator of the Money Makers Circle, is to apply a simple quality filter to the mass of media and research material that is sitting out there and then communicate a small selection of it to you in a concise and readable format, along with some personal observations. With many trusts sitting on large discounts, some managers suffering from their investment styles being out of fashion, and activists looking to unlock value, there is a great deal going on across the sector right now, and we attempt to highlight the key issues to be aware of.
The content includes:
- A weekly subscriber-only email that summarises all the latest investment trust news and performance, plus my views on the markets (free sample);
- Detailed in-depth independent trust profiles each week, written by my co-contributor, Stuart Watson (N.B. not sponsored – free sample);
- My latest thoughts, including insights from my conversations with leading professional investors and advisers;
- Links to interesting articles to read and helpful books on investments;
- My favourite funds across a range of sectors;
- My thoughts on the way the markets are behaving, including periodic videos with extensive chart analysis.
If you are among the many thousands of investors who are now listening to the free weekly Money Makers investment trust podcast or have seen a copy of the annual Investment Trusts Handbook, which I edit, you will have had a flavour of the kind of service that being a member of the Circle can provide. The aim is not to make recommendations (although alert listeners may infer some distinct preferences), but to share the insights of a knowledgeable and intelligent analyst of the sector in what I hope is an accessible way. The Handbook likewise attempts to provide useful background information on what I like to call the connoisseur’s choice of investment fund.
A wider focus
Investment trusts are not the sole focus of the subscription service. I also bring you some occasional insights into individual shares and open-ended funds, as well as occasional commentary on the global background (which in practice is intellectually interesting, but often of limited practical value). I should emphasise that it will not attempt to be comprehensive – that would be impossible even if it was desirable – but rather aims to complement your other reading with the perspective of one experienced, professionally qualified market-watcher. Convenience, experience and access are the qualities on offer, and I hope you will be tempted to try them.
Although the weekly investment trust podcast remains free, the Money Makers Circle charges an annual membership fee to help cover the costs of producing the service. I am not a charity, and it would be pointless to take on this project without the knowledge that it can be self-supporting and so remain free from conflicts of interest. All my recent professional experience, as a commentator, wealth management adviser and investment trust director, has depended on my ability to offer independent, unconflicted judgments.
The membership service is structured in such a way that anyone who subscribes can cancel at any time if not satisfied. If it has any value at all, the value to you should far outweigh the cost of a subscription. That is for you to determine, of course, but I very much hope that you will not only join the circle but participate in its development by suggesting areas of particular interest to you. Needless to say, nothing you read should be regarded as constituting individual investment advice, which is impossible without knowing your personal circumstances and tolerance for risk, and in any event, is beyond the scope of this offering.
All I can promise you is that everything you read will be based on honestly held opinions at the time of writing. It may be worth emphasising also that my personal investment philosophy – which derives from the many things I have read or learnt over the years – is that the key to investment success lies in making a few good decisions, not a lot of little ones, and therefore I try to avoid tinkering with what I own unless market conditions change abruptly.
Annual membership costs £120, and monthly membership is £12, so the annual price represents a saving of nearly 17% on the monthly fee. As a digital publication, delivered by email, no VAT is charged on a subscription. Our refund policy with respect to the annual membership is to refund any unused full months of your subscription.
Clicking on the Join Now buttons below will allow you to sign up either using Stripe (which accepts both debit and credit cards) or PayPal. I hope you will join us and hundreds of other subscribers on our investment journey. There’s never a dull moment in this game…..
Jonathan Davis