WEALTH WATCH
Spoilt for choice with unit trusts
Labels have snowballed but accessibility has been driven by falling fees and more information, writes Stephen Cranston
It was 25 years ago that I wrote my first story on unit trusts, assigned to me at random. It was a small industry. There were just 33 funds. I would be surprised if it had much more than R10bn under management. There was a small Association of Unit Trusts, which had no permanent staff. There were really only two people you needed to know in the industry, both Scotsmen: Alister Colquhoun of the then UAL Merchant Bank, who was the star of Diagonal Street, just about the only financial programme in those days before CNBC Africa or the Money Show, and Roy McAlpine, founder of Liberty Asset Management, undoubtedly the best investment mind of his generation. His famous scepticism about dotcoms and many of the insubstantial businesses that came onto the JSE a few years later made him look old-fashioned, but proved correct from today’s perspective.There were several reasons why the unit trust business was so small. It was still recovering from the crash of 1969. Just before the crash, some ...
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