Our insights challenge the status quo.
Berkshire Williams is a specialist advisory service that helps you see clearly what is really happening inside your pension and savings. We analyse performance, fees and risk so you can make your own informed decisions about your retirement income with confidence.
Our story
Alex Williams
Berkshire Williams was established by Alex Williams after discovering that a retirement savings plan from a major financial insitution had sigificantly underperformed against a market index, despite presenting positive-looking reports that created the impression of growth.
This was a real wake-up call for me. As someone who has worked in the Industry my whole life, it was a shock to discover the truth about the way some investment companies operate…
…fees are simply extracted from savers and paid out as sales commissions to agents and handed out as dividends to the investment company's owners whilst delivering below market returns.
Alex always managed his own investments, but had decades ago invested in a savings product created by a large household name financial institution. Upon close examination it turned out that the product had produced atrocious returns over decades leaving Alex with no real gains after decades of saving. This was the results of numerous high and often duplicated fees tother with investment manager undeperformance. Although this case is at the extreme end, it is unfortunately far from unique. Millions of savers in the UK are return poor returns and forgoing tens, or hundreds of thousands, in savings due to fees, poor asset allocation and under-performance. This reality is often hidden by a number of dirty tricks including breaking fees down into multiple small slices which clearly makes it difficult to get a clear total cost figure. More subtle deception includes the use of largely meaningless industry defined (Investment Association) performance benchmarks which allow an investment manager to dishonestly claim "outperformance" whilst delivering returns which are far below stock market indices. Alex set up Berkshire Williams to help people understand the size of the returns that they are forgoing and to explain the benefits of low cost index ivesting.<br><br>This is a theme that Warren Buffet has spoken about for decades, including in Berkshire Hathaway's 2013 shareholder letter where he states:<br><br>"My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors – whether pension funds, institutions or individuals – who employ high-fee managers."<br> <br> This is good advice and is supported by mountains of hard evidence going back decades, the purpose of our business is to illustrate this reality and help individual savers achieve superior returns for themselves. <br>
Alex Williams is also an independant researcher and journalist operating under the nom de plume Alex Kriel. He has spent around thirty years in the investment business including in hedge funds and pension funds. His most recent corporate role was working for a EUR 600 billion Dutch pension fund manager.