Liquidity: All it's cracked up to be?

Not all products offering limited liquidity should be tarred with the same brush.

Nick Train raised a few eyebrows earlier this month when he suggested Hargreaves Lansdown’s assets under administration could hit £240bn by the end of the decade. Also worth a closer look, perhaps, is something else he told the market recently. In his update to investors at the start of 2014, Train not only ran the rule over Hargreaves, he also revealed the results of a liquidity stress test of his £750m UK equity portfolio. The results themselves were notable. The fund, Train said, has a “relatively meaningful exposure to less liquid assets”. Just 46% of the portfolio could be liqui...