Another nasty shock for investors in property funds

In 2016, open-ended commercial property funds shut their doors amid panic over Brexit. Last week, it happened again. It’s as if these funds aren’t up to the job, says John Stepek.

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If we had to choose a word to sum up the most important theme in investment this year, it might be "liquidity". In summer, we saw the beginning of the end for former star fund manager Neil Woodford's asset management empire, as investors fled his funds faster than he could liquidate the assets that underpinned them. Now, liquidity has returned to haunt a section of the market that most investors might already have learned to be wary of open-ended commercial property funds.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.