Investment Companies and Managed Funds

Last week I referred yet again to the widely held misconception that investing in the share market is “risky”.

Common sense demands the acceptance of the fact that if investing in one company alone is “risky”, then investing in two, or ten or better still a thousand companies, is less risky. From time to time a single company’s share price will dazzle the market and really take off (does anyone remember Poseidon?). The proliferation of managed funds and the growth in numbers of listed investment companies provide us with the opportunity to sleep peacefully secure in the knowledge that our investment is safe. There are two managed funds that have been around for over half a century, so they have proven track records.

In 1952 at the start of the second Elizabethan age, the safety in numbers provided by widely held managed funds and for listed investment companies simply did not exist.