A nice day out – London Investor Show 2014
In the age of gigabit internet and the ubiquitous webinar, you could be forgiven for wondering who still turns up for the traditional exhibition-hall conference. Well, last week I did – along with a reported two thousand others – when I attended the annual London Investor Show at Olympia.
I came up with half a dozen reasons why it was worth my time:
- for the retired – and those who work from home like me – it’s a day out in the real world
- summer is officially over, and so for a few months indoor activities trump boozing on some lawn
- a have a friend who likes to attend finance shows, so it was a social and not a solo trip
- I live in London so the journey wasn’t too bad (despite the traditional rail replacement bus service) or too expensive
- I was given free entry to the fair, along with free access to the six lectures in the main auditorium ((this is a nominal saving of £175, but I’m not certain how many attendees actually handed over their cash))
- I can write about it for this blog
If you can’t tick three or four of those boxes you might not think it was worth yours. I didn’t personally expect to learn too much, though I often find that a live show can renew your enthusiasm for investment as well as keep you in touch with the latest developments.
For those unfamiliar with the UK investment scene it could be a fairly efficient way to gain an overview, though it might be a unrepresentative one (see my thoughts on what was available below); and there will also always be those who feel the need to kick the tyres on a product before diving in.
In practice, the audience at the show – which felt more like five or six hundred than a couple of thousand to me – were mostly white, mostly middle-aged and mostly male. There was a significant minority of Asian men, a couple of female speakers and a few more women working the stands.
The speakers and services on offer fall into six boxes, though some span more than one category:
- characters – industry veterans / “gurus” with a media profile, there to sell themselves but often also their own product (Alpesh Patel, Nicola Horlick, Rodney Hobson et al). The main auditorium speeches were over-represented in this category.
- information providers – ShareScope, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Investors Chronicle, Stockopedia
- brokers / spread-betting platforms – eg. IG
- training courses – usually in trading or technical analysis
- mainstream products – ETFs, ETPs, the SG listed products
- alternative and niche products – peer-to-peer, crowdfunding, wind and solar energy, wine, BitCoin etc.
Obviously one man’s mainstream is another man’s niche, but I make the distinction in terms of liquidity, costs and tax-status. Products listed on a UK exchange that I can place in my SIPP or ISA and can sell tomorrow at a reasonable cost are a different animal to those listed abroad, on a proprietary website in cyberspace, or nowhere at all. Fat fees for intermediaries and ineligibility for UK-tax shelters both spell niche to me.
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Mike Rawson
Mike is the owner of 7 Circles, and a private investor living in London.
He has been managing his own money for 40 years, with some success.
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