Monday 3 August 2009

Groan

Apparently someone, somewhere has presumably floated the proposal that fund managers should barred from trading -
But he warned: "In what he is saying there is a lot of danger, because if you tell institutions that they can't sell whatever happens, then they are sometimes going to have to hang on and cause their customers and clients - who are savers and pensioners - a loss because they can't sell. You have to retain the right to sell even when you want to engage as a good owner."
Has anyone (Darling, Myners, Walker Review) at any point suggested that fund managers would be precluded from selling shares? In all the stuff I've read over the years about ownership, and how we might address some of the failings there are in the current system, I don't think I have ever heard anyone argue that shareholders should be prevented from selling. What is being discussed is how to incentivise a sense of ownership.

Quite a bit of the recent commentary from the investment industry has (unintentionally or otherwise) conflated incentivising ownership with banning trading. It's a straw man, which is not encouraging in terms of reading how willing the investment industry is to really try and get to grips with ownership.

2 comments:

zedman said...

Actually Tom, I suggested in my blog on 23 September last year that uptick rules should apply for all selling, not just short selling. That way, investors could be assured of markets that only moved sideways or up. ;-) http://tinyurl.com/lp6gqf

Tom Powdrill said...

so it's your fault ;-)