What to expect from The Investors newsletter in 2024
A tough two years for asset & wealth managers. More grim results expected. But share prices have bounced. Will fundamentals turn to underpin price momentum?
My last post of 2023. A very quick read to see the year out.
First, a huge thank you to all subscribers. It’s very very early days for this newsletter, but I’m thrilled with the start and will be ramping up the work in 2024 to put out more (hopefully both useful and interesting) analyses on the asset and wealth management sectors.
Welcome to The Investors
A small change you’ll notice is that I’m tweaking the name of the newsletter. While Investing in the Investors might be a good description, it is a bit awkward and long for a newsletter and website name. So, the name will be changing to just The Investors, with a simpler web address/url too: TheInvestors.blog.
This should make it much easier for me (and you?) to tell people about the newsletter and to share on social media.
On that point, if you are enjoying it, and think it is worth telling others about, I’d be really grateful if you do share…
Other than the above, no changes, just a focus on putting out the most useful and interesting analyses.
Goodbye 2023, what to expect in 2024
The last two years has been tough for most asset and wealth managers with mostly weak markets, nervous investors and widespread outflows. This translated into some heavy share price falls, particularly in the asset management space, with only two out of 17 share prices up over this period (and one of those - Gresham House - is in the process of being acquired!).
But there has been an encouraging bounce towards year-end. Zooming in on the last two months of the above chart shows how significant this has been, albeit off a low base.
In the new year, I’ll be digging into whether business fundamentals in the sector are looking like supporting a continuation of this bounce…
In early January, I’ll be covering some of the more interesting Q4-23 trading updates, and then later in the month, I’ll do more comprehensive quarterly reviews of both the asset and wealth management sectors, with a look at the leaders and laggards of 2023.
In February and March I’ll be doing results commentaries of those companies with interim or annual periods ending 31 Dec 23, including Jupiter, Ashmore, Schroders and Pollen Street in the asset management space; and Hargreaves Lansdown, Quilter, Brooks Macdonald, PensionBee, St James’s Place and Rathbones in the wealth management space.
Then I’m also looking at covering a few new topics during 2024, including:
The potential impact of start-up and early-stage D2C investing platforms on London-listed incumbents, including Robinhood and Public.com from the US, Lightyear from Europe, and UK-born Prosper, to name just a few. I have started working on this one, and I originally thought of calling it ‘The Americans are coming’, but maybe a better one is ‘The tech-bros are coming’.
A critical look at ‘scale benefits’ which are often cited as a key rationale for much of the M&A and consolidation activity in asset and wealth management. But is scale really the silver bullet it’s often made out to be? I’m not so convinced.
Plus plenty more.
If you are a subscriber, and have any additional ideas you’d like covered in the newsletter, or have any other feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment or feel free to drop me a line at TheInvestorsBlog at outlook dot com.
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All the best for 2024!
Paul
And a reminder to share this newsletter with others if you think they’ll be interested. Many thanks!
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