Take note, Peloton: sweaty blokes make safer marketing

You’ll have had enough of politics and punditry, so let me introduce a non-political City debate (even if rather a technical one) around the M&G Property Portfolio. Founded in 1931, M&G is a trusted brand in collective investment products for middle-class savers but appears to have done what we might nowadays call ‘a bit of a Woodford’: namely, it has temporarily closed its £2.5 billion property fund for investor redemptions, having reaped rich fees in recent years despite what the FT calls ‘substandard performance’.

The fund in question owns a wide spread of UK commercial properties, 40 per cent of them in the struggling retail sector. It is ‘open-ended’, meaning it can issue or redeem shares at any time in response to investor demand and should always hold sufficient cash to meet anticipated redemptions. But a tide of negative sentiment saw big withdrawals from other UK property funds last week — and redemptions from M&G’s fund (which was holding just 5 per cent cash at the end of October) have been frozen, with part of the blame, needless to say, placed on ‘Brexit-related political uncertainty’.