Where can I find the full underlying holdings of my investments?

Hi,

Why can I not find out where my money is invested? It seems that when I dig into my pension, I can get as far as a top 10 but no further.

Thanks.

I agree that this is really frustrating and it’s something which the industry has debated for years. Basically the status quo is not to disclose more, and many asset managers don’t want to, and cite things like competitive advantage, etc. So we are flying blind.

And worse, many pensions use fund structures, not individual shares, and so your pension statement will reference some building block from an asset manager with alphabet soup in its name as one of your top 10 holdings. Think of it like Russian dolls and the pension is the biggest fattest one and there are sometimes about 4 dolls between your pension and any underlying shares. It is something which I think tokenisation and technology will resolve over the coming decade, but not anytime soon.

Some managers do show full lists of what they hold in funds or trusts – but they are few and far between. Scottish Mortgage enables you to see all holdings, which I find interesting, although some will say that is because not all their holdings are listed on stock exchanges and so are privately held, so it’s harder to copy them and set up a mirror portfolio.

I’m afraid this is a sign of an industry which treats retail investors as second-class citizens (harsh, but mostly fair) and is set up to service institutional clients. It’s still far too opaque in my opinion.