Good morning and welcome to your Morning Briefing for Friday 3 January 2025. To get this in your inbox every morning click here.
Hurst Point Group names new CEO for Hawksmoor
Platform market predictions in 2025
Martin Jennings, chief executive of Parmenion, hopes to see improved flows and a flight to quality in his predictions for the platform market in 2025.
He says consolidation, consumer duty, adviser tech, Artificial Intelligence will continue to dominate the conversation this year.
Protection Guru hires Coleman to lead adviser training programme
Protection Guru has appointed Jason Coleman to lead its adviser training programme.
Coleman, a respected protection trainer and technician, will take on the role of training and research manager at the business.
He will be responsible for a significant increase in the level of technical output from Protection Guru, as well as a series of new training initiatives.
Quote Of The Day
The pension landscape is fiendishly complex in parts, with lots of considerations for private investors to navigate. We hope our new campaign helps to untangle this complexity, leading to more consumers reaching retirement with greater confidence and healthier savings
– Craig Rickman, pensions expert at Interactive Investor, comments on the investment platform’s new SIPP campaign
Stat Attack
Market update: Stocks struggle for direction with the New Year rally fizzling out:
FTSE 100 struggles for direction in early trade in London.
Wall Street set to open higher, but investors are likely to remain more cautious.
Oil prices hover around eight-month highs with Brent Crude trading near $76 barrel.
The British Retail Consortium (BRC)-Sensormatic Footfall Monitor shows visits were down 2.5% over the ‘golden quarter’ and 2.2% lower over the year.
Source: Hargreaves Lansdown
In Other News
Interactive Investor, the UK’s second largest platform for private investors, reveals its most-bought equities, funds and investment trusts in December 2024.
While passive funds continue to be popular with investors, taking nine of the top 10 most-bought funds in December, one active fund topped the list – the Royal London Short Term Money Market fund.
The money market fund dethroned the popular choice of Vanguard LifeStrategy 80% Equity, which dropped to second place.
The funds list also saw a new entry to the list in December, the UBS S&P 500 Index. Notably, Fundsmith Equity has not appeared in the list for the third month in row. US companies continued to shine in December, with MicroStrategy, Nvidia and Tesla taking the top three spots for most-bought stocks once again.
New entrants to the top stocks list included Palantir Technologies, IAG and Advanced Micro Devices.
Scottish Mortgage has become the frontrunner of Interactive Investor’s most-bought investment trusts once again, after dropping to second place in November.
From Elsewhere
UK heading for tax rises despite return to growth (Financial Times)
Post-Christmas blues as UK bosses try to turn back clock on hybrid working (The Guardian)
Biden to block Nippon Steel takeover of US Steel on Friday (Bloomberg)
Did You See?
It didn’t quite match up to the US technology sector, but 2024 was a decent year for UK active managers.
This is particularly true given the inauspicious backdrop of constant outflows and a feeble economy, writes Darius McDermott, managing director of FundCalibre and Chelsea Financial Services
However, with the market still cheap, there is the potential for the UK market to build self-sustaining momentum in the year ahead.
The average UK Equity Income fund is up 8.9%, with the average UK All Companies fund just behind at 8.4%. UK Smaller Companies have started to recover from their long run of weakness, rising 6.7%. Active funds have generally outpaced the major indices, with the FTSE All Share up 4.7% for the year to date. At a tough time, it feels like a creditable performance.
Interest-rate cuts have helped, undoubtedly, but here too, the Bank of England has been notably stingier than the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank. There may have been tailwinds, but they have been more powerful for other stock markets.
Read the full article here.
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