Hit the road, Jack!

Jackie Lockie, AIC Head of Training.

Well, here we are again. The summer is nearly over and we’re all experiencing that ‘back to school’ feeling. In early July of this year, which feels like a long time ago, the AIC surveyed the many advisers who had attended the recent online training sessions, to ask for their feedback and find out what else we can offer them. The general feeling was that more, in-depth subjects on practical ideas for researching investment companies were needed.

To that end, I’ve had a very busy August creating training materials for numerous events in the run up to Christmas (sorry to bring up the dreaded c-word). The conference season is nearly upon us and I’ll be out and about at lots of events, as well as running more online training.

My main focus this week has been our new autumn seminars which start in Bristol on 19 September. After the popularity of the threesixty sessions back in January, which looked at the basics of investment companies, and in light of the feedback we’ve received, I want to look a little deeper into researching investment companies so that advisers can gain an even better understanding of closed-ended funds. We’ve written a great case study and invited Glyn Jones from Vanguard to talk about exchange traded funds, as well as Simon Moore from BestInvest to show us where investment companies and ETFs fit alongside each other in clients’ portfolios. Glyn and Simon are very knowledgeable guys with great humour, so along with me, who’s never short of an opinion (or two!), I expect we will have lots of interesting debates whilst passing on some practical and useful information to our audiences.

The AIC are also attending both the Institute of Financial Planning and Personal Finance Society conferences in the autumn, leading investment company workshops and providing any information you could need, and our online training sessions will be back by popular demand on 24th September.

Nearly time then to hit the road. Look forward to seeing you there.