Access The June 2019 Investor Magazine Edition

Hargreaves Lansdown has been one of Woodford’s biggest supporters regularly recommending his funds to their £1.2 million clients, and even holding sizeable shares in them through their popular range of Multi-Manager funds.

The fallout has led to MPs demanding Hargreaves Lansdown detail the financial extent of their relationship with Woodford, asking questions as to why they continued to promote Woodford’s funds even though they have consistently been the worst performers in their sector.

In this report, we look into the fees both Hargreaves Lansdown and Neil Woodford generated through their relationship and how much investing in Woodford’s funds has cost investors.

In just over 30 years BlackRock has evolved from an eight-person startup to a Global giant that manages more assets than any other Investment manager. They generated more than £800 billion of net inflows this past 5 years and their total assets under management currently stand at £5.19 Trillion, which exceeds the size of Germany’s economy.

BlackRock’s rise to the largest Investment Manager in the World is remarkable, and through their range of funds, and that of their popular iShares brand, the amount of client assets they manage grew on average by £4.4 billion per week in 2018.

As a company, BlackRock has delivered huge growth, but how have their funds performed for their clients? In this report, we analyse the performance and sector ranking of 193 BlackRock funds and 726 iShares funds and identify which of their funds have performed the best and which have struggled.

Royal London is the largest mutual life, pensions and investment company in the UK, with Group funds under management of around £123.4 billion.

In this review, we analysed the performance and sector ranking of all unit trust & OEIC funds, Life funds and Pension funds managed by Royal London Group companies.

Although a proportion of these funds have consistently been among the best performers in their sector, our report identifies that 67.1% of the 389 funds analysed have consistently underperformed compared to their peers.

To identify the performance and sector ranking for each of Royal London’s 46 unit trust & OEIC funds we compared their returns to every other competing fund within the same sector over the recent 1, 3 & 5year period, up to 1st June 2019.