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Had an email today saying they're reducing the exposure to the UK for the Lifestrategy funds. Thought this was a little unusual given how positive the FTSE has been going recently. Not really sure what to make of it. Haven't dug that deep into it yet. I'd not be impressed if it meant further US exposure as I've been considering trying to move investments away from there.
However what I know about investing can be written on the back of a postage stamp and thus far vanguard has worked very well for me. Do I trust their strategy or am I right to be questioning it?
I suppose if you trust them or not to do the best for your investment, presumably so as they are already managing your fund. If you are wanting lower US exposure, then you should probably move to one of their UK funds and take it on the chin if its isn’t as good a return.
Morals v Profit I suppose. You can quite easily avoid all US exposure. There are many many funds in the Vanguard range that don’t touch the US.
https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/what-we-offer/all-products
Bit of an explainer that I watched this morning. I guess it depends whether more Global means global or USA?
This is a good move, imo. But I am a firm beleiver in a passive global tracker - why is your money smarter than the trillions that have already decided the value of the companies / markets in the world?
Yes the fts100 did well in 2025, but it’s dominated by global companies in specific sectors. How did the ftse250 do? Not so well.
Over a decade UK market have lagged global markets and that has cost anyone with a significant bias to UK.
Any significant increase in UK exposure over market weight is irrational, imo. Your job, house etc are already “long” UK anyway.
In short I think this is a positive move.
Even more positive is the launch of the lifestrategy global funds. Same concept, no home bias.
A product I or my family will likely use in the future.
Its also become 2 bips cheaper. Still prefer the HSBC Global Strategy range, which are cheaper again.
Thanks for that Mugboo. A little to ponder.
They've been talking about doing this for years. Better to reduce your UK exposure after a good year than before one I suppose. I think the 5% will go into global, of which most will be US, which doesn't feel like great timing with the possible tech bubble. But who knows. It's not a massive change.
As mentioned above, the home bias had always been a criticism of the Lifestrategy funds. Something like VWRL is more globally diversified with less of a UK influence.
If you want less US, you can do that, even just into UK.
given how positive the FTSE has been going recently
‘Recently’. I’d hope that when constructing a fund the folks look at more than the last year or two.
Have UK markets perhaps shown less consistent growth than some others over the long term? Do they take longer to recover after periods of ‘turbulence’? If I remember correctly I’ve had a small chunk of pension investments in a FTSE 250 smaller companies fund for a while. Just as well it is not that much and its lacklustre performance hasn’t been too much of a problem.
For me, the whole point of these things, is that they do the thinking rather than me. I'm a barber with 3 O Levels, what the hell do I know about investing.
As bigdugsbaws points out, there might be slightly better options but this can lead to prevarication and put you off getting on with it. Make a decision, commit.
The important thing is to actually crack on and do it, as early as possible, then do your best to ignore it. I wish someone had explained compound interest to my young self, although I am self aware if to know, that I would neither have understood or cared, there were too many fun distractions back then and I was never going to get old...
My 15 year old doesn't know but he already has investements and my hope is that we can use this to really make him understand these things early in life. That or he'll blow the lot on travel, coke and hookers, either way he'll no doubt learn something useful 🙂
While we are doing Vanguard, I have a possibly daft question. My lads 100% Shares Lifestratergy which we started just before the Ukraine invasion is at around 60%, does this include money we have added or is the actual amount it has gone up by?
Good little video above.
Last year’s outperformance by larger UK companies over smaller ones was slightly unusual. One explanation is the continued exodus of money away from UK shares (in part driven by tracker funds such as Vanguard) because the money comes from active fund managers who are structurally overweighted to small and mid cap shares. I would observe that for the first time in many months there was a net inflow of money into UK shares in December, some no doubt encouraged by the reasonable performance of UK shares during the previous months (yes, i know there is an element of bolting the stable door about that, but that’s the way it goes). But the fact is, if the tide has turned on net flows (and this has been called for for so long many just ignore it - itself a positive) then it would not be unreasonable for small and mid sized businesses to once again attract a disproportionate level of interest and to outperform.
So, although one might understand Vanguard’s tweaking of asset allocation as it is still overweight the UK, to my mind they have slightly contradicted their own process which is to set parameters, allow the performance to dictate to the funds and leave well alone.
For me, the whole point of these things, is that they do the thinking rather than me. I'm a barber with 3 O Levels, what the hell do I know about investing.
As bigdugsbaws points out, there might be slightly better options but this can lead to prevarication and put you off getting on with it. Make a decision, commit.
The important thing is to actually crack on and do it, as early as possible, then do your best to ignore it. I wish someone had explained compound interest to my young self, although I am self aware if to know, that I would neither have understood or cared, there were too many fun distractions back then and I was never going to get old...
My 15 year old doesn't know but he already has investements and my hope is that we can use this to really make him understand these things early in life. That or he'll blow the lot on travel, coke and hookers, either way he'll no doubt learn something useful 🙂
While we are doing Vanguard, I have a possibly daft question. My lads 100% Shares Lifestratergy which we started just before the Ukraine invasion is at around 60%, does this include money we have added or is the actual amount it has gone up by?
Lifestrategy 100% has done 70% in 5 years and 50% in 3 years so 60% since Jan 2022 looks about right on the chart.
I'm trying to split 50% in 100% lifestrategy (26% UK changing to 20%) and 50% in another typical global fund (3-4% UK). Wanting to increase UK exposure and reduce US a little bit. That gave about 14.5% UK with the change makes it about 11.5%. The change suits what I'm aiming at investment wise currently.
It may or may not perform better overall at that but the overall difference should be minor either way.
daft question. My lads 100% Shares Lifestratergy which we started just before the Ukraine invasion is at around 60%, does this include money we have added or is the actual amount it has gone up by?
You might need to rephrase this question as it doesn't currently make sense to me.
Do you mean it is currently up around 60%?
I'm assuming you do. In which case no it doesn't include the money you have added, but it does include the money that you have made from the money you have added!
It's one of the problems with working out the actual annual growth on investments if you have drip fed the money in rather than just one purchase.
Yes, thats what I meant and thank you. I thought as much but its always better to ask, innit.
My lads 100% Shares Lifestratergy which we started just before the Ukraine invasion is at around 60%,
I'd be careful about using the information from the platforms themselves. They use crude measures that tend to give an overly rosy picture of investment performance IMO. IE it is likely that they're calculating that you've put in £X in total and now it's worth £X + %60.
If you really want to work out your investment performance, you need to keep a record and do unitisation every time you pay in.
The people suggesting tilting away from the US based on the likelihood of a crash are trying to time the market. Good luck.
There is an argument for having a slight home bias in your investments. This is *much* stronger for defensive assets than it is for growth assets. So, if I was invested in a Lifestrategy fund (which I am not), then I'd be more concerned about the reduction in the UK allocation of bonds than I would about the reduction in the UK allocation of shares. However the Lifestrategy fund is not aimed at sophisticated investors, and so the downsides of this change in allocation will likely pass most potential purchasers by, whilst the upsides are likely to attract them.
I'm trying to split 50% in 100% lifestrategy (26% UK changing to 20%) and 50% in another typical global fund (3-4% UK). Wanting to increase UK exposure and reduce US a little bit. That gave about 14.5% UK with the change makes it about 11.5%. The change suits what I'm aiming at investment wise currently.
It may or may not perform better overall at that but the overall difference should be minor either way.
For me, the lifestrategy funds are for de-risking closer to retirement or if you are very risk adverse as they are a mixture of equities and bonds, so you can choose 70/30, 60/40 split etc.
If you want pure equities (which if you are younger you propably do) then just an all world/global ETF...
Or what I have done is (currently) I have 70% in a global ETF (VWRP) and to get more exposure to Europe (inc.UK), 30% in VEUA. Then I can effectivley re-balance as I go by simply paying more into one, and less into the other. both these ETFs are inside a stocks and share ISA).
I've got another lump sum to put in, in April, so the question is how much of my 20k allowance do I allocate to each 🤔 I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Both funds have performed roughly the same in the last ten months for me, made 10.3% on all world and 11.3% on developed europe
Missed the edit window, but looking at the vanguard lifestrategy (100% equities version) it appears to just be a collection of ETFs under the hood. So that's a pretty good idea..
It looks a little USA-centric without looking too deeply though so I'm happy just having a few ETFs of my choosing and adding money manually to each if I want to change balance. For example I might contribute more into my European etf going forward than my global one, etc.
I chose VEUA as its pretty heavy on UK equities, but also has a decent amount of exposure to othet European countries:
I can certainly see the appeal if you want to be really hands off though: