Hello siblings, welcome to the first proper full week back as we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the maw of this unrelenting industry of ours. Outside our windows all kinds of devilment and flim-flam is gearing up, culminating of course in the inauguration of That Guy on Monday. The relentlessly faux-positive self-promoters are in overdrive already – “great to see XYZ which is favourable to me selling stuff!” “great piece in ABC that agrees with me!”, all with too many exclamation marks for anyone above the age of eight to use – and frankly, my dearest confreres and consoeurs, I’m just a touch Grumpy.
Cheering me up, though, is the impending langcatlive event in London in a few weeks – Divide and Conquer at Kings Place (Great to have the chance to plug my own event in my own weekly Update!!!!!). The plans are coming together, we’re not full yet but well ahead of where we were last year, and if you fancy joining us on 6 February then I wouldn’t hang about tbh. Full details and tix here, either free or extremely cheap depending on where you work.
I am also cheered by the response to last week’s challenge, wherein you could win a pair of lang cat Socks (our Socks always take a capital letter) by coming up with a suggestion the FCA could send to the Government about how to stimulate economic growth, wrong answers only kind of thing. From the many very funny responses there was a clear winner, and it was from John Stirling of Walden Capital in Saffron, er, Walden who wrote the following and should be rewarded with his own late night TV chat show immediately:
“Everyone knows that we need more investment into risk assets, and in particular equity funds, as this provides the pump in the economy towards growth. It is equally well known that volatility is very scary, and consequently institutional and individual investors often hold funds back or move into ‘risk off’ assets to protect their holdings. This is known as a ‘tragedy of the commons’ due to commonly performed, individually rational behaviour causing problems for all. In the 1990s regulators focused on standard charges, not allowing providers to compete on charges, and this led to poor outcomes. They now insist on specific charges and use common growth rates in illustrations. This is a much better system, and I believe should be extended to include all performance data. So no longer will there be differences between managers on the basis of performance. They will all have to declare their performance based on the level of risk they take. So, cash funds will declare performance of 2% per annum, fixed income 4% per annum, and equity funds 8% per annum, irrespective of actual performance. This will be taken onto platforms and providers, who will be required to reflect these growth rates within their client portals. UK equity should be a special case of 10% per annum to promote UK investment.”
What’s extra nice about this is people’s actual retirement funds will be a lovely surprise when they get them, and it’s nice to have lovely things. Excellent stuff. Congratulations John, the Socks are yours, and I’ll see if we can rustle up a replacement lang cat hat for you too.
I look at the word count and see I shouldn’t really do much more, as you have a Tabby McTat-ish Dozens of Things To Do no doubt. But I did clock Opinium’s AI survey which got written up all over the place yesterday. For amusement contrast this writeup and this writeup as a great example of two pieces saying the same thing but turning stats round for either a more positive or negative spin.
This isn’t the issue, it’s broadly on the level of “half the children in the Polson household helped with the dishes” vs “half the children in the Polson household pissed about until they got shouted at”. But we happen to have this year’s State of the Advice Nation survey very close to completion – it’ll launch at the London event – and we happen to have asked firms some very similar questions on AI adoption.
Our results are pretty different to Opinium’s (ours had a base more than twice the size); instead of 14% currently using AI tools, our research finds that just under 30% of respondents are currently on the – beep beep – AI bus, and a further 18% will buy a ticket this year.
On one level – who cares, right? Two surveys find different things, details on p.94. But on another level we do need to be careful with stats (even risk-based performance data), and in particular the difference between saying “nearly a third of advisers are using AI” and “a third of respondents to this particular piece of research are using AI”. It’s not even a subtle difference and when you get onto the really hot issues which firms might genuinely take as a spur to do or not do something, it matters even more. Don’t know why, but I think 2025 in particular should be a year of being careful with the old stats.
And for music – I went to see Insomnium last night and – despite a lacklustre London crowd, youse lot are spoiled – they were majestic. You’ve had Insomnium a few times on the Update, but never this one, so here’s The Promethean Song from Shadows of a Dying Sun which they played in full last night. And if you prefer a live version here’s one of those too.
