David Lapish

Review of Lowes Financial Management

We used Lowes for a few years but found that their...

We used Lowes for a few years but found that their performance was no better than the average informed investor could achieve for him/herself. Our capital was invested in about five different portfolios, each containing over a dozen funds. Some funds were common to more than one portfolio. This made our portfolio unnecessarily fragmented into lots of small holdings in different but similar funds. There was also no tool the client could use to monitor the performance of each portfolio. The Cofunds reports listed all the funds in one long list and did not report (or even mention) the performance of each individual Lowes portfolio. If two funds were in different portfolios the holdings were lumped together making it nigh on impossible for the client to see if the portfolio he/she had signed up for was performing in line with expectations. I discussed this with my IFA but there was no prospect of this issue being addressed. As the overall performance was only in line with the market I decided a couple of years ago to save the fees and manage things myself with a Hargreaves Lansdown account. I am very happy to have made that decision. I do not usually leave online reviews and am only doing so because Lowes have both emailed and written to me asking me to do this.