Alpesh B Patel argues individual investors should skip fund managers and buy stocks directly. Fund managers spread capital so thin, holding only 0.5% of a stock versus a DIY investor's potential 5%, that their performance claims become meaningless. You get better returns controlling your own portfolio.
You can do this yourself. You can directly buy the stocks. A fund manager doesn't have access to stuff you do. Rarely, they might have access to SpaceX. How'd that work out for you so far? Great. They've got one thing, SpaceX. Well done. So what are you going to do? Give it to all the fund managers forever? You can just have direct— basically, you're paying for a personal shopper. I went to Sainsbury's last night because it's got good air conditioning on an evening. And I thought to myself, would I get a personal bloody shopper to go around and shopping for me? No, because I quite like looking, knowing what I'm buying. What happens if I get a Cardozoom? They deliver the crappiest fricking tomatoes. Why is it when there's an intermediary who's getting paid to pick something for you, they always give you shit? Cardozoom, that's what giving money to a fund manager is. I think you should learn to do it yourself. And I said, well, you would say that, wouldn't you, Alpesh? Because you've written 18 books on it. You made your life educating people through your Financial Times columns and your Bloomberg TV shows and all your books and your FT columns. You would say, learn to do it yourself. I know I would say that, wouldn't I? Structural floor, wall of cash. Where are we on all of this? Okay. There is a lot of money. There's a lot of money going around and the fund managers have got so much capital, they spray and pray and put a little bit into everything. So you might want 5% in Nvidia or Western Digital. They're going to have about 0.5% in it, especially when the IFAs put it into 15 funds and only one of them had Western Digital or whatever, or Rolls-Royce. So you end up with 0.5%. And then they'll brag about it. Oh yes, our Western Digital stock went up 9%. We did rather well. No, if you did any well, you would have had 5% in it, not 0.5%, you idiot.
