Myths Of The Smart Money

Investors are best off trying not to do anything dumb

- Marcus Padley

I have never liked the expression “smart money”. It is demeaning to individual investors and used by commentators to imply they are smart and the rest of you aren’t. But a lot of supposedly smart professionals do some very dumb things, and a lot of non-professional investors, often my clients, do some very clever things.

There are only a few “smart money” activities, inaccessible to the mortal investor, some of which are the domain of big institutions; others are only available to the very wealthy and others are a myth.

They include:

Access to IPOs

Being given larger allocations of hot new issues is something only the big institutions get, and they get it because the brokers controlling the issue want to suck up to them to get their secondary market business. Read the monthly reports of some of the boutique fund managers and you will come to realise that this is a significant source of out performance for some small and midcap managed funds.

Individuals can theoretically get access to this sort of action by signing up as a sophisticated investor with a broker. They are called “s.708 investors” because of section 708 of the