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Before the UK’s latest Budget, families were told capital gains tax would soar and pension tax-free cash would be cut. None of it happened. For one family modelled by Y TREE, selling early to beat a feared tax rise would have cost up to £138,000 over ten years, more than twice what the Budget itself costs them. Sometimes the best thing to do with a portfolio is keep your hands off it.

Premium Bonds are a safe home for cash, but they were never a way to build wealth. The headline prize rate is an average; with typical luck you win less, and a good savings account or cash ISA often pays more. The exception is higher-rate taxpayers who have filled their ISA, and next April's rise in savings tax strengthens their case.

The government is exploring a reward for people who open their first stocks and shares ISA, and the industry will help design it. Done well, it could get many more people investing for the long term. Done badly, it becomes a marketing budget for fund sales with a government badge on it. Three design choices will decide which.

Between shares and bonds, rebalancing your portfolio doesn't raise returns and usually costs a little. Its value is that it makes you buy what has crashed and sell what has soared, which instinct tells you not to do. The US evidence shows when it bites, how often to bother, and how to make it automatic.

Nobody can establish who first used the phrase 'evidence-based investing', and no regulator defines it. Robin Powell, who was given the name by Larry Swedroe in 2015 and is sometimes wrongly credited with coining it, sets out what it actually means: four tests of what counts as evidence, borrowed from a medical parallel that hit the same crisis twelve years ago. Including where he goes further than a global tracker, and why he holds that position less firmly than he used to.

Dimensional Fund Advisors aims its marketing at professionals and has long been associated with financial advisers. Yet a TEBI check found its funds listed on mainstream UK DIY platforms, many with ISA and SIPP eligibility. Here is where you can hold them, how they compare with Avantis, the firm set up by former Dimensional executives, and why a good planner still has a role.

In a new experiment, 3,700 people chose between two index funds tracking the same index. One of them paid more in every possible outcome. When a chatbot was told to promote the worse fund, the share of people getting the choice right fell from 64 per cent to 34 per cent. Telling them the bank had money riding on their answer made no difference at all. A survey of 836 UK retail investors, published in July by Opinium, found that 54 per cent had already used AI to look up inves

New FCA figures show that fewer than one in three wealth management firms also offer financial advice. That is not a scandal, and nobody has been mis-sold anything. But it does mean a great many people are paying for a well-run portfolio while assuming they are also getting a plan. The two are not the same thing, and it is the plan that answers the question most investors actually care about: can I stop work when I want to?

Fifty years ago this week, the first index fund for ordinary investors went on sale and almost nobody bought it. The company behind it had been named two years earlier after a ship in a picture on its founder's wall. The story Vanguard tells about its own beginnings is tidier than what actually happened, and less useful.

Most people think share owners are greedier, more selfish and more inclined to gamble than everyone else. Research across 11 countries finds that belief predicts who invests and who doesn't, and that it bears no relation to financial knowledge. Offered an identical bet, people took it when it was called a lottery ticket and refused it when it was called a share.

Hedge funds are sold on diversification, uncorrelated returns and capital preservation. Goldman Sachs publishes the 50 stocks that turn up most often among their largest long positions, and eight of the ten biggest make chips, memory or the machines that make chips. Most of what a hedge fund does never reaches a regulatory filing. The disclosed long book is the one part investors can inspect, and at the middle of this year it was almost 40 per cent technology.

Active share was meant to identify fund managers worth paying for. A new study covering four decades of US fund data finds that high active share funds now systematically underperform low active share funds. The reversal began in 2010 and coincides with the rise of passive investing creating structural pressure on active managers.

Theodore Sturgeon argued that the surviving tenth of any field is worth finding. New data from S&P Dow Jones Indices tests whether that holds for UK funds. Of the 80 sterling-denominated UK equity funds in the top quartile at the end of 2021, three were still there four years later. Over two non-overlapping five-year periods, funds starting in the third quartile reached the top far more often than funds already there held their place.

Prediction markets and sports betting price outcomes almost as accurately as the stock market prices companies. A new Morgan Stanley report explains why that shared accuracy still leaves nearly every bettor poorer, and nearly every long-term investor richer.

he most careful expert forecast of AI's economic effects covers GDP, productivity, employment and inequality. It does not cover share prices. Across 21 developed markets and 120 years of data, economic growth has shown no reliable positive relationship with what shareholders earn. What has correlated is growth in earnings per share, and four mechanisms separate the two. Here is what the evidence says about AI and stock returns, and what the railways and the dot-com boom alrea

Warnings that index funds have broken the stock market all imply a threshold: a share of the market at which price discovery fails. Nobody making the argument names it. Owen Lamont, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, argues that no such number exists short of complete passive ownership, and that what actually determines whether prices stay informative is who is left doing the trading. His case, the strongest peer-reviewed research against it, and what the performance

Leopold Aschenbrenner had better access to AI than almost any investor. His hedge fund grew to $24bn in less than two years. Yet it collapsed not because his AI thesis was wrong, but because leverage forced him to sell. The AI investing risk his story reveals is one most investors overlook.

A poll asked Britons to choose between £50,000 for certain or a coin flip for £1 million. Nearly three quarters took the sure thing. Expected value says they were wrong. Rationality says they might be right. The real insight lies in what the choice reveals about risk — and how to make the right decisions when it matters most.

Buy the clean companies, avoid the dirty ones, and emissions fall. That is the promise almost every sustainable fund rests on. New calibrations from Samuel Hartzmark of Boston College and Kelly Shue of Yale suggest the version of ESG divestment that leaves a high-emitting industry altogether can push global emissions up, while staying inside the industry and holding the cleanest companies in it brings them down. On a fund factsheet, the two look identical.

MoneySuperMarket spent decades telling people where to find the cheapest deal. Now it sells its own investment platform, pitched as low-cost and compared, for once, by the company doing the selling. The funds are sensibly chosen. But is 0.34 per cent a year really low, and is a comparison run by the seller one to trust? A look at the fee, the pot-size trap and the comparison the comparison site left out.