Post by CharlieAccording to the register on the FSA website, they are no longer
authorised as of 29 June 2009.
Interesting.
Nelson in 1987 lost about 50%, basically £42k became £22k, then moved
to more conservative investments. So I always wondered how they did in
2008.
Nelson's approach was logical albeit a little childish in names - they
had a 3 box solution, Box-1 being cash, Box-2 being income, Box-3
being stocks which was either growth defensive or aggressive. The
problem is they were poor advisers at the customer level - in terms of
making people understand a) stock outperformance can result in crashes
and b) stocks must be added to continually over a long time horizon
rather than "created then walked away from". If you can only "create"
a stock holding you must have discipline and building it half, then
phase the rest in over 7-10yrs. The net result is people tended to
draw down the Cash & Income "boxes", relying on the stock one to "make
the withdrawals back" or worse spend in anticipation of them making
the losses back. Then, of course, when a blowup happened people sold
at the bottom and moved back to Cash & Income as they could not afford
to lose any more.
Hence the typical 1987 result of 50% loss through less than ideal
stock selection (that was Defensive so no idea what Aggressive would
have been like), being an actual 50% loss at the portfolio level.
A lot of financial advice is best given AFTER you have seen their
credit-card, loan, current account situation :-) Indeed it is perhaps
best to start coming through the latter before you see a figure and
drawing up asset-allocation ideals.
Will contact them (whatever they are) shortly just in case they have
1985-1990 statements. I doubt very much, but you never know -
sometimes they exist in an archive or document scanned in.