On February 2nd ESMA released some long awaited results of its investigation on falsely active equity UCITS funds (also called “closet indexers”). Those are funds that claim to be “actively” managed but that are in fact merely following market indices, although they charge much higher fees than low cost index-tracking funds such as ETFs. The
BETTER FINANCE, the European Federation of Financial Services Users, notes with concern that the panel on “relevant players in the market for long term capital” at the upcoming Conference by the European Commission and the Italian Presidency on the Capital Market Union, does not include any representatives of individual investors, although they are explicitly (and
In view of the recent FOREX and LIBOR scandals, EuroFinUse finds it astonishing that the media are not paying attention to the fact that the largest market of all – the currency exchange market – is not regulated at all and has been completely overlooked by the European Institutions and regulatory bodies. Rapid steps to achieve EU
EuroFinuse, the European Federation of Financial Services Users, is closely following the debate onthe “UCITS V Directive” that is currently focusing on depositories’ liabilities and asset managers’remuneration.These are two major issues that have to be tackled by EU institutions, as they were exposed as theweakest part of the UCITS framework during the financial crisis. Performance
In an article published in the Financial Times, Madison Marriage reveals the names of 3 fund managers who have changed their fund documents after being accused of flouting EU rules that require fund managers to tell clients how they performed against their chosen benchmarks. EU law provides that funds that have a benchmark must disclose
Guillaume Prache, Managing Director of BETTER FINANCE, has been recently quoted in the FT discussing the impact and importance of consumer investment regulation, including the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II: “Most funds covered are actually retail long-only ones – for example, in France, there are 3,500 domiciled
BETTER FINANCE was quoted in Funds Europe on its research on robot advisers. Indeed the research says that nearly all robot advice providers in Europe were registered as financial advisers but that many were also registered as asset managers or had a contractual relationship with a registered investment company. “Therefore, terms such as ‘robot investing’
The Irish regulator will launch the "largest ever investigation in Europe" into the fees asset managers charge investors in order to assess whether the investment products offer "value for money", reports the Financial Times. The probe comes after several countries launched investigations into closet trackers in recent months, including Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. In
BETTER FINANCE was mentioned on the topic of closet indexing in an article by Ignites Europe, the Financial Times’supplement for the funds industry. The article reports on Luxembourg’s decision to launch a probe into closet tracking, with the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier analysing thousands of funds to uncover any misbehaviour. In a letter to ESMA in late 2014,
A documentary about the fund industry called “How to Win the Loser’s Game” was produced and released last year. The author, Robin Powell, repeatedly quotes the findings of our report and shares how this document transformed his life: "I’ve never been called a Communist before, and certainly not a Jihadist. But in the last few