St James’s Place Funds Underperform

13/09/2017

Only two of 26 funds offered by investment provider St James’s Place have outperformed their benchmarks over both one year and five years, and since their inception, a new analysis shows.

Ten of the 26 funds have, however, underperformed when looking across one year, five years, and since inception.

Of the 36 funds currently offered by SJP, Square Mile said it could assess only 26 because the funds’ reports often displayed more than one representative index.

An SJP spokesman says: “SJP funds are monitored against the unique investment objective for each fund, and are presented net of all associated costs — i.e. all advice costs, platform or administrative charges, product tax wrappers and external fund manager fees.”

Architas investment director Adrian Lowcock says: “Effectively, [SJP] is saying it has bundled all its costs into the fund, which means the client has no idea what they are actually paying”.

This is not in the spirit of the current RDR legislation because investors cannot do a genuine comparison.

According to SJP reports in March, costs for the funds are close to 2 per cent in most cases.

This is important to clients as it must be remembered that SJP are NOT independent – advisers of the St. James’s Place Partnership only represent St. James’s Place Wealth Management plc.

If you would like to compare the performance and charges of SJP funds you hold to others in the market place, please contact us >>

Written by Colin Caulfield | Director

Colin is a Chartered Financial Planner & Pension Adviser Of the Year Read more >>

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