Why it’s not right to rank every single fund

The answer depends on which fund type, so let’s break it down:

Unit Trusts / OEICS

When you take into account all of the different share classes there are over 50,000 funds registered in the UK. However, we don’t cover all of them. We’re only interested in funds that are readily available to retail customers, and then we only cover one share class per fund. Which share class is available sometimes varies from one platform to another, and you may have a personal preference for holding income or accumulation versions.

The underlying performance is the same and that’s what we’re interested in.

Investment Trusts

We try to cover a comparable range of ITs. We don’t include ‘Private Equity’ or ‘Venture Capital Trusts’, which are beyond the scope of Saltydog Investor.

ETFs

All we’re trying to do with the ETFs is show a handful from each area of the market so that we can see that the patterns that we have identified in our sector analysis are being reflected in the broader indices.

It also gives our members the opportunity to see what is happening in parts of the market not covered by unit trusts, OEICs, or investment trusts. Things like commodities and currency.

There are nearly 8,000 ETFs listed in the UK, and we deliberately don’t try and cover them all. We don’t see the point in listing a dozen different S&P 500 trackers with basically the same performance. If the S&P 500 is doing well, then we only need to monitor a couple of ETFs to be able to see this.

We’ve reviewed all ETFs and found a cross selection that provide a good enough representation of the sectors. And that is the point, at Saltydog we believe that the sectors are the important start point.

If there’s a fund that we don’t track and you think we should, please let us know and we’ll review it.