This week...
Monday
The morning kicked off with the usual dog walking, falling out with kids, and packing them off to school, before racing over to the office for our weekly pipeline meeting.
We have got a colleague over in Spain so we usually do a video conference, but another adviser had booked the meeting room for a client appointment, so we had to do a stand-up in the top floor office, which sort of worked better.
The rest of the day was spent putting various due diligence documentation together for our adviser team, which is our investment committee.
Later on, I raced home through a tonne of traffic as my wife is in the Women’s Institute (WI) and I needed to look after kids.
Tuesday
It is paperwork day – lots of client emails to keep me stimulated. I also have to prep for a board meeting of a corporate client that I am meeting on Friday.
Wednesday
This was my ‘prep-for-interview’ day. I have been shortlisted for two of the Money Management (MM) Awards and I try to spend a day constructing suitability reports for both of the case studies – hoping that this will put me in a good place to talk about them.
I have also managed to slip in an appointment to help a contact of an existing client with his pensions.
Thursday
Off to Londinium. In the morning at 10am I talked to the BDM guys at Vanguard – they had given my portfolios (run on an advisory basis) to their analysts who had some feedback.
This was really interesting, and thankfully confirmed all my research, but it did highlight that one fund manager might be drifting off their mandate.
Vanguard’s chief economist, Dr Peter Westaway, also popped in for a chat about the company’s world view. It was very interesting to talk about the productivity catch-up in the UK, and the theory that platform employers (Uber, Amazon etc.) are allowing people to work in their own zero hours environment, which may be causing a measurement problem for the productivity stat.
After Vanguard, I head in the direction of the FT offices for my awards grilling.
The MM interviews are great; you really get challenged, and the judges give nothing away. I would highly recommend the experience.
Dan Jones, editor of MM sits in the corner and takes notes, while Jacqueline Lockie, deputy head of financial planning at CISI, and the legendary Robin Keyte take turns.
I made a couple of slip-ups; one was that I said the management team at Impax Asset Management were Irish, and the other was that I knew nothing useful about protected settlements. It is like doing Bake Off and having a soggy bottom on the first challenge. I hope the strength of the rest of my answers made up for this. The lesson for next year – expect the unexpected.
