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Re: Highest yielding shares underperformed FTSE 100 over five years

Posted: July 18th, 2019, 7:25 am
by TUK020
Gengulphus wrote:No. HYP on the HYP Practical board is a short name for a type of strategy & for portfolios run according to strategies of that type. Those strategies are high-yield strategies, but not all high-yield strategies are HYP strategies. It's only specifically defined on the HYP Practical board, by the guidance for that board, but I think it's probably better to think of it as being defined that way across the entire TLF site. That's not to say that it's wrong to use the term HYP to describe other types of high-yield strategies and portfolios outside the HYP Practical board, just that it risks being misunderstood rather more than usual. So it is liable to interfere with communication during a discussion, which rather goes against the whole point of discussion boards!

Gengulphus


We've been round this loop before. A less confusing term would be "Bland Annuity Replacement"

Re: Highest yielding shares underperformed FTSE 100 over five years

Posted: July 18th, 2019, 8:32 am
by Gengulphus
TUK020 wrote:
Gengulphus wrote:No. HYP on the HYP Practical board is a short name for a type of strategy & for portfolios run according to strategies of that type. Those strategies are high-yield strategies, but not all high-yield strategies are HYP strategies. It's only specifically defined on the HYP Practical board, by the guidance for that board, but I think it's probably better to think of it as being defined that way across the entire TLF site. That's not to say that it's wrong to use the term HYP to describe other types of high-yield strategies and portfolios outside the HYP Practical board, just that it risks being misunderstood rather more than usual. So it is liable to interfere with communication during a discussion, which rather goes against the whole point of discussion boards!

We've been round this loop before. A less confusing term would be "Bland Annuity Replacement"

I was describing what is the case, not what should be the case. HYP is the name we've got, and there is enough stuff written about it in the past and still referred to that any attempt to change it would IMHO produce far more confusion than the existing term. I agree that it's not a particularly well-chosen term, and if I could use a time machine to go back and change all past instances of it to something better-chosen, I would, but we have to work from the situation we've got...

That 'something better-chosen' would not be "Bland Annuity Replacement", though, as I can immediately see a number of sources of confusion about that term. A HYP is not a replacement for an annuity, both because it lacks annuity features, especially the guaranteed level of income that an annuity provides (*) and an annuity's complete fire-and-forget nature, and because it has features that annuities lack, such as easily being tradable-in for a capital sum. It's an alternative to an annuity, with advantages and disadvantages that will make it better for some uses of annuities and worse for others, but not a replacement for one. Also, the "Bland" at the start of the term would require frequent explanations that it's the name of the deviser of the strategy and not a descriptive adjective to avoid confusion, and Stephen Bland would probably not really like to have his name associated with some of the strategies that are accepted as HYP strategies on the HYP Practical board...

So my main advice is not to bother trying to change the term HYP but just accept it as the name we've got for a type of strategy. And my fall-back advice if you don't want to take that main advice is to really think about possible sources of confusion in whatever term you want to use instead before putting it forward.

(*) There may be so-called 'annuities' around that don't have any such guarantee - I don't know enough about the full range of such products on sale to know for certain. But if so, they are IMHO in contravention of trade description principles and whatever regulator allowed the term to be used ought to be ashamed of themselves...

Gengulphus