End is nigh for index huggers

Ever more funds have started to publish their 'active share' scores. Merryn Somerset Webb explains why that's great news for investors.

Over the last few years there has been a growing consensus that corporation tax is all but impossible to collect from multinational companies. Given that they can effectively declare their profits and hence be taxed (or not) anywhere they fancy, it has seemed to a good many analysts that it is hardly worth the bother of trying to pin them down.Better to let globalisation take its course and find other ways to raise tax revenue.

We have never been convinced on this one, on the simple basis that sovereign states can pretty much do what they want, if only they have the political will to do so. Today, with their whopping debt problems and the rise of angry chatter against tax-avoiding corporations and "the rich", they do.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.