Before we launched MoneyWeek, I worked in finance, mostly as a junior broker selling Japanese equities to international clients out of Tokyo. I liked it. It was intellectually challenging; involved hanging around with lots of clever and interesting people; and, crucially, it was fairly well paid. I stopped in my late 20s, however, when I was fed up with mergers (there was a wave of consolidation underway in investment banking) and with living in Tokyo.
And it was only then that I began to pay any attention to what the business I worked in actually did. That sounds ridiculous. But here’s what I mean. In no training courses or continuing professional development (CPD) events at any of the places I worked did anyone ever mention whose money we were happily moving around the place. The clients we talked about were the big fund-management companies, not individual savers.
If I had stopped to think about it I would have known that at the end of the chain – perhaps with shares in the investment trust run by that nice man from Gartmore, or with units in the open-ended fund run from Sydney – there were real people saving to improve real lives, and paying the real fees that were covering my (quite high) expenses. But these people, the ultimate beneficial owners, or UBOs, simply weren’t mentioned. An industry that should have reminded itself every morning before the market opened that every action it took affected a UBO in one way or another, did not do so. Not ideal.
When Jon Connell approached me in London about launching a sister magazine to The Week, MoneyWeek, I thought it was a fabulous chance to start redressing that balance: to give the UBO, the ordinary investor, the information and hence the power to both judge and challenge fund managers, wealth managers and independent financial advisers (IFAs). These were the days when if you bought units in a fund via a financial adviser, you paid him a percentage of the value of the assets invested in that fund every year for as long as you held it – even if you never spoke to him again.
It was also a time when personal-finance and investing journalism was a bit rubbish. There were some brilliant business journalists, but the money market (while jammed with press releases) was short on quality information and analysis. That was a particular problem in 2000, when ordinary investors needed help even more than usual. The dotcom bubble had burst earlier in the year, and even the rather more staid UK market had already fallen for three quarters in a row for the first time since 1974. It was nasty out there… and maybe not the best time to launch a magazine.
We did it anyway. We mostly planned it in the same Italian restaurant in Westbourne Grove – over so many lunches that when I once went in the evening with someone else, the manager asked if my boyfriend knew. That was perhaps a sign that it was time to stop talking and start doing! Jon raised the money and got the infrastructure going. I hired the team, and we launched into a decade of bickering, new rounds of money-raising and magazine redesigns. We received sometimes challenging, but mostly charming backing from first Angus MacDonald and then Bill Bonner (both of whom I remain friends with – huge thanks to you both). As a result, we became the best-selling financial magazine in the UK by (I think) 2008.
I’m extremely proud of what MoneyWeek has achieved since then and extremely grateful to the many readers who stuck with us for so long. The first few issues were awful. But we gradually found our feet and our voice, and along the way we built an excellent group of writers, editors, and production people who have long been both brilliant and loyal.
Look to the back of the magazine and you will see names such as the current editor Andrew Van Sickle, politics editor Emily Hohler, picture editor Natasha Langan and writer Jane Lewis. All these people have been with MoneyWeek since issue one. John Stepek, the editor after me, was with the magazine for 17 years.
MoneyWeek successes and struggles
The standard of personal-finance and investing journalism has soared since 2000. The business itself has become far more democratic with the rise of investing platforms, social media and the advent of the auto-enrolment pension. I loved playing our part when I edited MoneyWeek, and have also been pleased to see that our campaigning on everything from fund fees to shareholder democracy has seen significant successes.
But here’s the bit that worries me. In my first editor’s letter, I wrote about taxation. There was a Budget coming up. The public finances weren’t in a bad state: there was even a budget surplus (imagine that!). But I was still horrified by Gordon Brown’s plan to raise public spending by significantly more than the UK’s rate of GDP growth at the time – and by the idea (clearly close to Brown’s heart) that spending by the state was somehow an inherent good.
Soon, I said, confidently “we will look back and be amazed” that it could ever have been accepted that government could control such a vast percentage of the country’s GDP. What can I say? I was young. At the time, debt to GDP was around 30% and public spending was 37% of GDP. Today, those numbers are near 100% and 44%. We’ve had many successes with the financial industry over the years (witness fund fees today). But I think it is safe to say that MoneyWeek has had less traction with politicians. The battle continues.
Merryn Somerset Webb now hosts the Merryn Talks Money podcast and newsletter for Bloomberg. You can find her on X @merrynsw
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